Angry Underwear

Angry Underwear | Tania Ferrier

From Saturday 15 November 2025
To Sunday 15 February 2026

About

In 1988, Tania Ferrier, a young Australian artist, was living in New York, working nights as a bartender in a strip club. After witnessing the sexual assault of a friend and dancer at a club, Ferrier created the 'underwear that bites back'.

Responding not with silence, but with paint, Ferrier began creating lingerie emblazoned with snarling animal faces for the dancers to wear. Dubbed Angry Underwear, these hand-painted pieces were both a form of protection and protest, becoming a bold feminist commentary on a woman's right to protect her own body.

What began as a personal act of solidarity soon grew into a cultural phenomenon. Media stories spread the word, and Ferrier’s pieces caught the attention of celebrities like Madonna and Naomi Campbell. Exhibited in Manhattan and later in Perth, Angry Underwear blurred the boundaries between art, activism, and fashion long before those conversations became mainstream.

In 2021, her work was featured in the National Gallery of Australia’s Know My Name exhibition, celebrating women artists who changed the narrative of Australian art. Today, Ferrier’s practice continues to evolve.

In 2024, as part of its regional tour, Ferrier collaborated with creative sewist Dana Stoll to create accompanying accessories that further enhance the iconic works, which continue to roar with relevance over three decades after its conception.

At its core, Angry Underwear is about resistance and reclaiming agency through creativity.

Angry Underwear is costume as cultural intervention; she who is coded to-be-looked at can look (and bite) back.
- Zoe Sofoulis, Praxis M arts journal

This exhibition invites viewers to reflect on how art can both protect and provoke, and how even something as intimate as underwear can become a weapon of change.

Exhibition Opening Event

Join in an inspiring evening on Friday, 14 November, from 5.30pm, as we celebrate the launch of BRAG’s Birak season program with the opening of four powerful exhibitions: The Good, Angry Underwear, Monument, and Clay on Country. For more information about the Opening Event, visit the event page.

Angry Underwear Workshops with Tania Ferrier

Tania Ferrier

Multi-disciplinary artist Tania Ferrier addresses political and social justice issues through her works. Known for her Angry Underwear feminist art statement, Ferrier now works across various mediums, including painting, collage, photography, video, costume and installation, to explore and challenge mainstream representation of female identity.

Her aim is to shake up and subvert mainstream image culture and grant women an active role in reimagining the banal ideals of beauty and desire found in mass media.

In 2022 and 2024 she received arts grants to explore this theme in an exhibition at Fremantle Art Centre, Gallery Central and Albany. In 2021, her well known Angry Underwear artwork was exhibited in the Know My Name exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, as well as featuring in the book Doing Feminism. Her paintings have been acquired by the Cruthers Collection and recently exhibited in Lines in the Sand at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in 2025.

Discover more about Tania Ferrier here

^{Image: Tania Ferrier, Angry Underwear NYC}