Why do we crave closeness while keeping one foot out the door? Why do we love, withdraw, cling to or sabotage our connections with others?

Attachment Styles brings together works from the 19th to 21st century to explore these questions, showing how artists have long grappled with the emotional complexity of human relationships between individuals, communities and the environments they inhabit.

The display draws on the language of attachment styles: anxious, avoidant, disorganised and secure. These psychological concepts were first developed by John Bowlby in the 1950s and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth to describe the emotional and behavioural patterns that shape our bonds from infancy through to adulthood. In recent years, these ideas have spilled into popular culture, saturating social media with memes, reels and quizzes that map our relational behaviours – ghosting, breadcrumbing, love bombing, negging, to name a few—onto the styles of attaching.

Viewed through this lens, the Gallery becomes a kind of ‘global group therapy session’ as artworks reveal our desires, fears and relational gameplaying. Romantic conventions, domestic dramas, fractured families and spectral intimacies across time, place and experience, appear side by side. In doing so, such works challenge us to consider how the the attachment styles formed in our earliest relationships shape the ways we love, withdraw, idealise, defend and connect throughout the entirety of our lives. Collective attachments, especially the social and political bonds that shaped life in this country, also emerge in this display, reminding us that attachment is never just personal.

Frederick McCubbin Down on his luck 1889. Oil on canvas, 114.5 x 152.5 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia.