It's a survey show of work from the last 10 or 12 years which looks at different elements
of my practice that have a real focus on Australian history, shared histories, indigenous perspectives
and also conceptual and theoretical frameworks which are part of that whole dialogue and narrative
about the histories from our settlement until now.
My family comes from North Queensland, my father's family a few generations ago came from
from America and England and arrived in Mackay in North Queensland and farmed up there on
Canadian farms and my mother's family were from further north, they're from Cairns and
my mother's indigenous family from the beginning.
The exhibition has a real focus in many of the works on blue and white and that particular
palette has quite a significant kind of reading in those images.
Blue and white is drawn in these cases primarily from the spatial and virtual world and it's
part of that traditional transfer work that was generated in the late 18th century and
at about the same time Australia was being colonised and settled.
So blue and white imagery has this really interesting kind of cross-cultural dialogue happening
within and already and so blue and white in my work represents the transformed or the changed
landscape within that imagery which is here.
I incorporate figurative elements and they are naturalistic depictions of indigenous people
at about that time of contact and about that time of settlement.
There's also elements of Australian wildlife which are pictured as well.
So the composition really draws heavily on historical traditions and narratives and as I say
talk about the contextual relationship between environment and people at about that time in
our history.
So they've become a really important kind of indication if you like with the experience
of people and also the way they would have experienced that change.
So it's an unfolding kind of comment on shared history, on multiple histories and on a comfortable
dialogue which takes place against the backdrop of enlightenment and kinds of, you could call
it, perceptions about the exotic.
And also too in relation to the development of photography at about the time of Aboriginal
people began to be pictured was very much about the idea of the scientific eye and capturing
if you like the ethnographic or anthropological subject which is kind of a complex conversation
as well because it has implications in terms of the identity of Aboriginal people and also
how culture was read at about that time.
So in many of the images there is a very strong focus on compositional elements such as the
frame or the floral border that appears in the pictures.
Now floral borders or borders themselves become very important framing devices because they
suggest to the viewer that in fact the image or the scene unfolding within that frame and
border is an allegorical or a poetic space.
And it talks about the experience of the narrative in the picture, not so much a factual representation
or a recounted actual event, it's the recounting and retelling of an experience.
So when we read that we read it as an analogous series of signs and symbols which point to
I would say both specific and very broad in general histories.
Thank you.
