Original signed and limited edition numbered artwork (series of 8). 2023.
Archival pigment inks on Canson Arches Aquarelle rag. Australian hardwood frame stained pencil grey by Neo Frames.
94 x 79cm
Winner, People’s Choice Award, Banyule Works on Paper 2023
Under Auntie Dot’s kitchen table in the 1970s, I listened as my mother and aunties awkwardly discussed sleeping with clothes pegs on their noses to narrow them to a white aesthetic. Extraction of information over the decades came with a quiet self-conscious shame, eventually and proudly revealing a family history tracing back to the Ebenezer Mission in Dimboola, and further to as yet unknown First Nations people in Victoria or South Australia.
This artwork’s source, ‘A Female Aboriginal’ from The Australasian (1905), is disturbingly sad. I wanted to empower her with anger and defiance, to counter the infestation of white noise from lost histories and those currently fuelling the furnace of division. The overlaid cartographic travel lines of a motherboard evoke the spiritual mapping of First Nations art, bringing the past and present together as one.