Does Your Wife Make Honey?
Works by Mia Gunton
30 April - 2 May 2026
Mia’s self-portrait explores the symbolism of sexuality and desire in cinema through still life and self-portraiture. Inspired by Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965), a film that examines fidelity and happiness through an exaggerated abundance of flowers, the work draws on Varda’s lush yet unsettling visual language. In Le Bonheur, flowers become so saturated and excessive that they begin to mock beauty, masking betrayal beneath idyllic imagery.Mia inserts herself into stills from the film, disrupting its pastoral veneer. By replacing the audience’s communal gaze with her own returned stare, she shifts the dynamic of spectatorship into a self-aware, voyeuristic exchange. This series considers floral imagery as a metaphor for sexuality, desire, and betrayal. Through still life and self-portraiture, flowers become both seductive and accusatory, questioning who performs happiness and who carries the consequences of desire.
Mia Gunton is a Gold Coast based artist who has recently graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts at QCAD (2024). Her practice draws on cinema, still life, and self-portraiture to examine how visual culture constructs narratives of sexuality, desire, and betrayal. Mia appropriates and re-stages stills from cinema, inserting herself into scenes to disrupt the passive gaze. Using floral and food symbolism, she considers how visual languages shape cultural understands of pleasure and power.
