'Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art'

To date, surprisingly little has been published on urban contemporary Aboriginal art in comparison to 'desert' contemporary Aboriginal art. Yet it is a movement - of profound social, political, cultural and artistic significance - that has gained momentum in Australia, and attracted increasing international attention, since the late 1980s. I begin to explore the art and culture of this movement focusing on women artists, in the essay ‘Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art' just published in The International Journal for the Arts in Society. Discussion in the essay focuses on the work of prominent Australian Indigenous artist Fiona Foley's work, including an interview I conducted with Fiona Foley at her retrospective 'Fiona Foley-Forbidden' (2009-10) at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art; the works of artists in the the exhibition Women's Art, Women's Business at Sydney College of the Arts, July 2010; and the context of the Boomali Aboriginal Artist Co-Operative, which Fiona Foley co-founded in 1987. 


I gave a conference presentation based on my research for this paper, at the International Arts in Society Conference at Sydney College of the Arts, last July 2010, which coincided with the Sydney Biennale where Fiona Foley had an installation on Cockatoo Island.

The project was assisted by an Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts New Work grant.

Here's the abstract of the paper:

Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art

By Ruth Skilbeck

Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian women contemporary artists made an important contribution to the foundational impacts and ongoing significance of feminism and the 1970s Women’s Art Movement on all that has followed in international contemporary art. Whereas distance from Euro-centric culture was once lamented by Australian settlers as a tyranny, critical distance from colonial power discourses has functioned as a strength for women artists who use their art to gaze back not only at colonial oppression of Indigeneity, but also at western art’s historical hegemonic male representation of women in the public cultural domain. Women artists do this by representing themselves. Fiona Foley, one of Australia’s foremost artists and a curator, academic and writer, has since the 1980s in her art confronted political issues of Indigeneity and identity as a woman in a cultural history of trauma and dispossession- bearing witness to her cultural heritage as a descendent of the Badtjala people, who were forcibly removed from K’gari or Thoorgine (Fraser Island) in the early twentieth century. The paper applies an innovative multimodal fugal critical analysis – drawing on psychological and musical meanings of fugue – to discuss Foley’s work; the paper draws on an interview the author conducted with Fiona Foley at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, including photographs of the artist and images of her work. The analysis focuses on Foley’s site specific installation at Cockatoo Island at the Sydney Biennale 2010, and her recent survey show at the MCA.

Keywords:

Australian Contemporary Women Artists, Urban Aboriginal Australian Artists, Indigenous Art, Global Feminisms, Fugal Writing

International Journal of the Arts in Society, Volume 5, Issue 6, pp.261-276. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 1.078MB).