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WOMAN: Since I was a small child, my mother always said
all she needed to do was give me a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil,
and I was happy.
Drawing, painting to start with.
Moved into photography, and now I really enjoy making three-dimensional set-ups
from found objects.
When I create sculptures, they're quite small,
but, to me, they're larger-than-life-stories
that draw on, you know, my childhood growing up in the bush,
with an Aboriginal mother and grandmother
talking about these spiritual beings
that would come to you if you were doing the wrong thing,
and that would also guide you through life.
I think, like a lot of women artists, particularly as a mother,
I should say I end up working at my kitchen table
or in a shed that I've converted into a small studio space.
It's not comfortable.
I don't have enough wall space to work in a bigger way.
So I like looking for opportunities to create work outside.
The current installation I'm working on
is about bringing together the notion of forgiveness
with paying tribute to my grandmother,
who had suffered enormous racism throughout her life.
And she was a very talented artist. She was a landscape painter.
But she ended up working as a domestic in laundries
and just doing really hard manual labour.
I found these white rags and just saw this beautiful potential in them
because it made me think about my grandmother scrubbing clothing
and getting it really white and clean.
And also this white notion of whiteness and cleanliness and godliness
being wrapped up together,
and blackness and darkness being bad and dirty and not good enough.
The other work that I love doing is collaborating with community.
One was Black Side Story.
It was about documenting Indigenous people in the Western Suburbs
and their notion of Aboriginal identity.
The myth of Aboriginality being tied up in the bush
and in the remote areas of Australia
is a stereotype that we fight all the time,
particularly as urban Indigenous artists.
Another collaboration I did was with Bindi Cole,
and we created a work called Flour, Sugar, Tea,
which commemorated the resilience of Aboriginal women
during the mission days.
So, yeah, we created work together, which was really exciting.
I think, in collaborating,
there's this whole process of letting go of your control.
'Cause I think a lot of artists are really control freaks.
You know? (Laughs)
That's one of the reasons you make art, because it's something you can control. �