Emily Hunt, ‘Soiled’ (installation view), 2013. The Commercial Gallery, Sydney.

Emily Hunt is not afraid of the dark, dirty and grimy. Her work takes its cues from the grotesque and abject, but her writhing, bodily forms are carefully observed and depicted as to render them unnervingly alluring. This tension pervades the ceramic sculptures, etchings and drawings that comprise Soiled, Hunt’s debut solo show at The Commercial.

Three large works on paper dominate one wall, with sculptures laid out as if on a mantelpiece below. The wall works are part drawing, part painting, and are rich in colour and detail. Decaying flesh cascades like a baroque flower arrangement, its meaning obscured by a kaleidoscope of garish colour and pattern. Hordes of deformed men and women embark upon obscure witch-hunts, whilst figures in the background are simultaneously posing and decomposing. The works are dense and bizarre: a semi-pornographic Hieronymus Bosch dreamscape.

The centrepiece of Soiled is Hunt’s ceramic work, produced during a residency at the Zentrum für Keramik in Berlin where she was mentored by ceramics master Thomas Hirschler. Stoneware clay and Limoges porcelain are massaged into amorphous forms, stacked as sculptures, mounted straight onto the wall as tiles and presented as relief forms mounted on canvas.

Hunt combines fastidiousness and imperfection in unexpected ways. The accepted ways of doing things are eschewed, but never at the expense of making good work. Irregular tile edges and finger marks in clay are embraced, but chipped or cracked pieces are outright rejected. Hunt’s etchings are rich in tone and bold in line, but the zinc plates have been unceremoniously guillotined and reconfigured as plinths.

Hunt works with subject matter that is dark and disturbing. Hunched figures, grotesque faces, protruding fingers and penises, distended eyeballs and sagging flesh are represented in sculptures, prints and drawings. This imagery is recurrent throughout Hunt’s back catalogue, and each form has come to have distinct meaning and character. Fingers, for example, are significant for their possibility as genderless penetrative instruments.

Hunt’s bodily exaggerations feel at once satirical and deeply sincere. She holds to Freud’s analogy of the mind as an iceberg, with our conscious minds the proverbial tip. The artist’s own subconscious is mined for imagery, and Hunt is not averse to displaying the most debased things she finds lurking in the depths. The result is brutally direct, unapologetically bold and utterly enthralling.

Soiled, Wed to Sat 11am to 6pm, 13 – 21 December 2013 and 8 – 18 January 2014; The Commercial, 148 Abercrombie Street, Chippendale, (02) 8096 3292, thecommercialgallery.com

Emily Hunt, ‘grotto/ruin/relic’, 2013, glazed stoneware, 41 x 15.5 x 15 cm. Photo credit: Jessica Maurer.

Emily Hunt, ‘The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits – Castings as Janus Heads’, 2013, high-fired brown stoneware with clear glaze, 20 x 15 x 15 cm.

Emily Hunt, ‘The Charlatan’, 2013, hard ground etching on paper, 54.5 x 38 x 5 cm (framed).