The ideas for this book have been unfolding for a number of years, but it began as a written text during research for my Ph.D. in 2010. Initially, I was specifically examining contemporary art and memory in relation to Wadjemup/Rottnest Islandâa carceral island off the coast of Perth, Western Australiaâthat housed Aboriginal men and boys from across the state for almost 100 years. This largely concealed and minimised history has enabled a flourishing tourist community and subsequently become central to the identity of Perthâs people. However, the mechanisms of imprisonment, and the way in which these histories have been conveniently forgotten, point to much larger, overarching themes in contemporary colonial Australia and other colonial spaces. This book couples this earlier research with broader explorations into island histories in the global south. Using the lens of contemporary art practices, I explore the work of artists who engage with these island landscapes and trouble the stories that have been written around them. Through linking island geographies, colonial history, memory work, feminist and practice-led research methods, I hope to underline the crucial role that contemporary art plays in understanding identity and nationhood. This book is told through the lens of my own perspective of an artist. This sometimes difficult role of artist/writer ultimately means that I can offer unique insights into working, making and thinking. Like the argument I make for listening with our feet, my insight comes from âgetting closeâ, rather than seeking objective distance. In Chapters 2 and 3, I specifically address the histories of islands of the British Empire. The naming and exploration of these histories provide a structural strategy to ward off forgetting and to address the context for the concerns of the artists explored.
The group of artists in this book have had long and diligent careers problematising dominant cultures and then finding gentle and persuasive mechanisms to address violent and traumatic histories. They include Julie Gough (Tebrikunna); Lisa Reihana (NgÄpuhi, NgÄti Hine, NgÄi TĆ«); Karla Dickens (Wiradjuri); Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha/Nukunu); Megan Cope (Quandamooka); and Yuki Kihara (SÄmoan/Japanese). I have tried to tell the stories of these women with respect and care, recognising how influential their approaches and practices have been on me as an artist and thinker. Selecting artists that are all women was an unconscious choice to begin with, but increasingly and finally a recognition that women work in particularly revolutionary waysâways which draw me to their practices. Female artists often work more collaboratively; they listen a lot, work on smaller-scale projects and move gently, more enquiringly (self-critically?) through their research. Of course, this is a generalisation, but it has certainly been my observation from working as an artist for almost thirty years.
The artists herein donât always suggest or aim to provide solutions to complex problems, but their projects and practices often encourage audiences to âsit inâ their ideas and engage in discussion. As first nation women, they find their gender is not their biggest struggle, although it compounds the extent and impactfulness of their work. As Griselda Pollock noted in her seminal 1996 text, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, âFeminism is not for gender what Marxism is for class, and postcolonial theory for race. First, there is a range of feminisms, in varying alliances with the analyses of what oppresses womenâ.1 This more complicated, intersectional and layered approach provides a certain optimism and clues about how we might approach the world today as we inadequately respond to the Anthropocene , war and injustice on unprecedented levels.
The artists I explore use diverse and heavily symbolic materials that almost always employ disruptive but fragile processes of working and presenting ideas. They donât lock themselves into material choices or subject matter. Instead, their work emerges from a long tradition of storytelling and inclusivity. Some of these artists have been able to support themselves through their practice, but most have ignored the criteria of the art market, and none of them employ paint as part of their primary practice. This in and of itself is to take a position in the dynamic of âsuccessâ. It is instead the social and critical potential of the work that drives them.
The women whose work I explore work in the global south, and I argue that âsouth-nessâ flavours an attitude towards working and thinking. Their relationship with the landscape is not Europeanâthe eye/land pairing identified by cultural geographer John Wylie is part of the dismantling capacities of their work.2 In particular, they use islands to form strategies and ideological frameworks for thinking through history. For Yuki Kihara , there is a vast difference in the European consideration of SÄmoa as a tiny island and how she envisages it as part of a sea of islands. On the surface, this position is beautifully poetic, but it is also deeply political. As Epeli Hau`Ofa notes, if we look at the myths, legends and oral traditions, and the cosmologies of the peoples of Oceania , it will become evident that they did not conceive of their world in such microscopic proportions. Their universe comprised not only land surfaces, but the surrounding ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it, the underworld with its fire-controlling and earth-shaking denizens, and the heavens above with their hierarchies of powerful gods and named stars and constellations that people could count on to guide their ways across the seas. Their world was anything but tiny. They thought big and recounted their deeds in epic proportions.3
For Kihara then, the ocean is a landscape tooâit connects, rather than isolating communities across Oceania. As Nicholas Thomas (2014) suggests, islanders are far from landlocked peoples but are constituted by outward worldly cultures that build communities based on voyaging.4 For Kihara and others, this perspective provides a framework to counter hegemonic views and practices. There is a recognition therefore that a priori knowledge already provides a framework for displacing colonial mentality.
Central to the oeuvre of these artists is the contestation of the land, and specifically colonial invasions and land theft by the British. Their island homes are as varied as any landscapeâthe almost European climate of Tasmania in which Julie Goughâs stories are situated, through to the tropical islands of North Stradbroke where Megan Cope works from. Yet the islandnessâthe boundedness of these spacesâhas enabled a distinct sense of place and locality to their works. Cope, for example, uses her island to escape the âwhite noiseâ of the mainland.
I have been in long discussions with the artists throughout the researchâwanting to include their voice wherever possible and simply enjoying the generous and creative conversations that have unfolded. Key concerns that link them have become increasingly clear. Perhaps the most compelling thread is one of journey. This refers to the lives of the artists themselves and the difficult pathways to self-actualisationâin many places being an artist is an act of resistance still, and this is true of all the women I discuss. These narrative threads have led them back to ancestral homes and languages, across seas to excavate archives that hold the histories of colonisation, and back again. They have journeyed to shift and change museum and contemporary art world structures that have situated their stories at the periphery for too long.
The situatedness of first nation histories has changed significantly since I have left Australia for London in 2012. Exhibitions such as Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia; With Secrecy and Despatch at Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales (2016); Sovereignty at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne (2016); and TARNANTHI at the Art Gallery of South Australia (2017) have altered the landscape of contemporary practice that it is at times unrecognisable from Australia that I began my career in as a young artist in the early 1990s. This has been in part because of incredibly powerful, largely female, curators such as Brenda Croft who I interned under at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in the early 2000s. Croft expanded the collection and support for first nation artists throughout Western Australia in unprecedented ways to build one of the most important state art collections in the country. A new generation of curators such as Kimberley Moulton and Clothilde Bullenâboth women who come from or who have made deep connections with Western Australia in various ways. When you consider curatorial practices across the global south, women have always been curators, in the broadest definition of the term, of histories and people and stories left behind. They have been fierce fighters against injustice and used the platform of cultural practices to create pathways for better futures and to minimise the losses of the past.
This strength and resilience is an act of survival in colonial spaces. In Australia, we see ourselves as apart from the worldâthe only nation that consumes an entire continent. It is also the only commonwealth nation of 200 that still does not have a treaty with its first nation peoples. It is therefore both wedded to Britain, but attempts to exist as separate from it in peculiar and unique ways. Like many former colonies of the British Empire, it is a land full of contradiction; it enjoys incredibly high living standards, except if you are Indigenous, and then, you can expect some of the worst in the world. Australians also consider t...