2008
This large painted and collaged work on cardboard seeks to illustrate the devastation of dispossession which is described below by the white anthropologist W.E.H Stanner in the mid 20th Century:
“No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an Aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home’ warm and suggestive though it be, does not match the Aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp’, ’hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else all in one. Our word ‘land’ is too spare and meager. We can now scarcely use it except with economic overtones unless we happen to be poets. The Aboriginal would speak of ‘earth’ and use the word in a richly symbolic way to mean his ‘shoulder’ or his ‘side’. I have seen an Aboriginal embrace the earth he walked on.
To put our words ‘home’ and ‘land’ together into ‘homeland’ is a little better but not much. A different tradition leaves us tongueless and earless towards this other world of meaning and significance. When we took what we call ‘land’ we took what to them meant hearth, home, the source and focus of life, and everlastingness of spirit. At the same time it left each local band bereft of an essential constant that made their plan and code of living intelligible. Particular pieces of territory, each a homeland, formed part of a set of constants without which no affiliation of any person to any other person, no link in the whole network of relationships, no part of the complex structure of social groups any longer had all its co-ordinates. What I describe as ‘homelessness’, then, means that the Aborigines faced a kind of vertigo in living. They had no stable base of life; every personal affiliation was lamed; every group structure was put out of kilter; no social network had a point of fixture left. There was no more terrible part of our nineteenth century story than the herding together of broken tribes, under authority, and yoked by new regulations, into settlements and institutions as substitute homes. The word ‘vertigo’ is of course a metaphor, but I do not think it misleading. In New Guinea some of the cargo-cultists used to speak of ‘head-he-go-round’ men and ‘belly-don’t-know’ men. They were referring to a kind of spinning nausea into which they were flung by a world which seemed to have gone off its bearings. We are watching a little miracle when we see men who, having been made homeless, again pull their world together sufficiently to try to make another home for themselves, like the Gurindji at Wattie Creek. It is something which people brought up on ideas of land as ‘real estate’ or ‘leasehold’ find difficult to understand.”
W.E.H Stanner: The Boyer Lectures: After the Dreaming p206
On Alcoholism – A Vertigo in Living
This work is about alcoholism. I’m looking at it from a cellular and molecular place. I’m trying to see what alcohol induced liver disease looks like, from a dissected dead liver to the diseased cells under the microscope. The painted white lines that the imagery are attached to are reminiscent of genetic strands and also communities. Some are more healthy than others. They are all vulnerable and prone to contagion. Some are bleeding from the centre, being the red blood cells and some are dead with no red center. Alcoholism, I believe is genetic but also contagious by association. And no one in close proximity to it is safe from associated damage and fallout.
Colonisation is about fragmentation, disjunctures and separations and alcoholism is the same thing. I know from my own personal experience of fragmentation because of alcoholism and addiction. And that personal experience parallels what happens because of colonization. The consequences of that fragmentation caused by colonisation carries on until the present day.
In my collaging I show the different ways non-indigenous artists have illustrated Indigenous people; some were sympathetic while others really racially stereotyped Indigenous people and these images were on the colonisers tableware. So I’ve incorporated some of these images of indigenous people from the Studio Anna Ceramics and from Martin Boyd’s ceramic work dating from the1950s and 60s.