12VA Theory - Fiona Foley Part 2 of 3

Fiona FoleyAboriginal Artist

Foley’s Art Practice• Foley spends at lot of

time researching and reading about the historical and political past of colonial and Indigenous Australians.

• She seeks to educate current Australians about the concealed histories of the colonial past, and uses the knowledge and truth about the past that she discovers to inform her concepts and subsequent artmaking practice.

• Her practice includes sculpture, photography, video art, etchings and installations.

Foley’s Art Practice

• Foley can be regarded as a postcolonial artist, as she deals with the legacy of the 18th and 19th Century European rule, which had a negative effect of the colonised Indigenous people.

• Her practice integrates personal experiences and the collective history of her forebears.

Annihilation of the Blacks (1986), 278 x 300 x 60 cm, National Museum of Australia.

This sculpture installation refers to the massacres of a number of Badtjala people near Maryborough in 1861.

More of Foley’s Art

Velvet Waters, Laced Flour (1996). Tin boxes with salt, honey, red oxide, fish bones, and human hair, strip of flour on floor.

This sculpture installation refers to the practice of early frontier conflict when rations of tea, flour and sugar were mixed with arsenic and given to the Aboriginal people.


Witnessing to silence (2005). Installation view, Brisbane Magistrates Court. Lotus stems: Cast bronze, etched pavers. 180 x 140 cm diameter. Water, stainless steel, laminated glass.

The work incorporates three elements: cast bronze lotus lilies that emerge from ethereal mist, stainless steel columns embedded with ash in laminated glass panels, and etched place names in granite pavers.

The element of fire and water symbolise the common practice of covering up the evidence by getting rid of the bodies.

During the planning phases Foley intimated that the work referred to Australian bush fires and floods.



Once the work was completed, however, sherevealed to The Australian that this piece was actually a memorial to the many massacres of Aboriginal people which had taken place, during the colonial settlement and expansion of Queensland in the early 19th Century.

A trenchant critic of colonial policies and practices, Foley employs a number of artistic strategies to convey her political themes.

Witnessing to Silence as a public installation acts as a memorial to those massacred in the state ofQueensland.



“Fiona Foley is known for inserting coded messages in her commissioned works.”

Nancy Sever

“Of her public artworks, Foley says her theme has been to retrace indigenous footsteps and write an Australian nation, a person or an historical event back into Australian history. In the 21st

century, more than ever, Australian history can wield power.”

Bronwyn Watson Public Works Sydney Morning Herald 16th Oct. 2010


Edge of the Trees(1995). Sculptural installation by Fiona Foley, and the non-indigenous artist Janet Laurence.

This award-winning public art installation evokes the cultural and physical history of the site, before and after 1788: a pivotal turning point in our history, when First Contact and invasion / colonisation took place.


Edge of the Trees(1995). Sculptural installation by Fiona Foley, and the non-indigenous artist Janet Laurence.

Her artistic practice not only seeks to restore Aboriginal people to history but also critiques prevailing cultural assumptions about identity and belonging.


Sydney Cove by unknown artist (1794).

The city of Sydney is predicated upon the dispossession of Aboriginal people – their loss underpins the city‟s foundation and growth as it expanded over more and more if their country. Their dispossession was instant too. The year 1788 is a fatal turning point, where black „prehistory‟ is neatly sheared off so that the white „history‟ of city-making can begin.

It‟s a powerful date, archaeologists use „at 1788‟

for the way Aborigines lived before Europeans arrived.


Photograph of where the the installation is located in Sydney.

The site of this installation is very important, as it was the site of first contact, conflict and dispossession.

A 'forest' of 29 massive pillars – sandstone, wood and steel – cluster near the museum entrance. Wooden pillars from trees once grown in the area have been recycled from lost industrial buildings of Sydney.


The names of 29 Aboriginal clans from around Sydney correspond to the 29 vertical poles. Walking between the pillars you hear a soundscape of Koori voices reciting the names of places in the Sydney region that have today been swallowed up by the metropolis.


Organic materials such as human hair, shell, bone, feathers, ash and honey, are embedded in windows within the pillars, evoking prior ways of life.

Natural and cultural histories are evoked by the names of botanical species carved or burnt into wooden columns in both Latin and Aboriginal languages, along with the signatures of First Fleeters.

Place names are engraved on the sandstone pillars in English and Aboriginal languages.

The signatures of crew and convicts of the First Fleet, which arrived in Sydney Cove in 1788, are engraved on zinc plates.


Opening Day, Australia Day. (26th of January, 1995)

Because Foley‟s installations such as Edge of the Trees encourage the audience to wander around the installation, the audience is physically as well as emotionally engaged, and thus the Conceptual Framework is called into play.

In such an installation as Foley‟s Edge of the Trees 1995 the audience becomes physically part of the artwork, and the artwork becomes part of the audience‟s world.

Thus the boundaries between the agencies of the Conceptual Framework become blurred.

Homework• How is the audience essential to Fiona Foley and Janet

Laurence’s Edge of the Trees installation?

• 500 words, submit via email, due next Theory lesson.

12VA Theory - Fiona Foley Part 2 of 3

Education

Transcript of 12VA Theory - Fiona Foley Part 2 of 3