Fiona Foley is one of Australia’s leading aboriginal contemporary artists. She is a political activist, a curator and a writer. Her work is controversial, provoking, and all but bland. She was born in 1964 in mainland Australia, at a time where aborigine people had no say in the society in which they lived. She studied Art and Education in Sydney, Australia, and at St. Martins School of Arts in London.
The title for her exhibition at the October Gallery in Bloomsbury, ’Strange Fruit’ comes from a poem written by Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allan (1938), that Billie Holiday later turned into one of her most famous and classic songs. The poem was inspired by Lawrence Beitler’s 1930 photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana and was used to help change the racist terror that prevailed in the Southern states of the USA until the 1960s.
I met with Foley at the October Gallery where we were surrounded by her provoking work. We sat at a table in the middle of the gallery, she was a very pleasant and welcoming person. Maybe not what one would expect of a contemporary artist, none of the crazy hair cut, or strange fashion sense. She was just an average looking lady with sad eyes and a warrior spirit.
Big City Redneck: When did you first decide to become an artist and what made you become an artist?
Fiona Foley: I think my aboriginal family, my great uncle and great auntie inspired me to become an artist when I was growing up as a child.
BCR: When did you first realise that you wanted to do this full time?
FF: When I was in high school I majored in Art and I went from there straight into Art school. I started to realised that I became an artist very focused on the work that I was doing and probably a little bit ambitious, and thought that if I just worked hard I could have a career in the Arts.
BCR: You where born in the mainland Australia, and considering the political situation did you go to a mixed school and if so, how was it?
FF: I went to school on Hervey Bay. The school was mixed, and those memories are also memories of racist taunts on the way to school and from
school everyday. So what we learned as a family was that we had to stick together. My brothers and sisters and I would get off our bikes and when racists taunts were being said to us we would retaliate back.
BCR: From all the stories about Fraser Island (originally called Thoorgine and K’gari Islands) and the images present in this exhibition I get a sense of a very beautiful place inhabited by peaceful people. Yet considering that Elisa Fraser was the first white person to come to Europe and speak about them, giving lectures about their savage cruel behaviour, e.g. boiling of live people, what has been the impact of that in your life and your Art, specially since those islands are named after her.
FF: It made me understand that history is written differently for two groups of people in Australia. There are the colonisers and the people who have been colonised, so history has been written by the victorious. When I started to analyse the Elisa Frazer narrative, and it’s a colonial narrative… because she got shipwrecked in Fraser Island in the 1836 and was there for a period of about 5 weeks and rescued. What it said to me is that she had been written into history but all of those Badtjala people, men and women, had been written out of history. So there’s no recording of aboriginal people at that time and really right up to the present time people will say “Oh we don’t know anything about Badtjala people”, because nothing is really written down about them and there’s very scant information. So my role as an artist really it’s to write Badtjala people back into history. Alot of the time I’m making art that tries to redress that imbalance.
BCR: You’re a direct descendent from the Badtjala people, the original people from the Fraser Islands. And yesterday on the opening speech for your exhibition it was said that the Australian government tried to “assimilate” the aboriginal culture by getting white men to “mate” with aboriginal woman. Do you have any direct cases of that in your family that made you want to fight the system, or the reason for the way your work is orientated is simply to do with the aborigine people history in general?
FF: Has a child I had a deep sense of loss of my culture, and that always stayed with me. By 1904 after the Anglican mission was set up on Fraser Island what they affectively did was wipe out the culture in one generation. That means that you lose your language, you lose your traditional culture in
terms of Art, dance, ceremony and how you decorate your body. And once that goes in one generation it’s very hard to get back. By the early 1900s people were no longer practicing ceremony anymore or speaking their language, and that was forcedly imposed upon people but there was strong resistance. What Geoffrey Robertson was talking about last night was the conflict, the wars on the frontier in Australia that you wouldn’t have here in Britain – a common knowledge of. But there are over 250 different aborigine languages and nations in Australia, and everyone of those fought back and resisted. My family were politically aware and conscious of what was happening in terms of federal politics in Australia, so growing up, has I said before, I had a deep sense of loss and that politicised me from a very young age.
BCR: So that’s why you are also a social activist. Can you tells us a bit about the work you’ve done has a social activist, how does it all mix with your role as an artist? I hear that you started an organisation…
FF: That was in 1987, about twenty years ago, a group of aborigine people living in Sydney. We were all young artists that had gone to art school, and we were finding that the doors to the establishment of the gallery system in Sydney weren’t necessarily open to aboriginal artists who worked and lived in the city. So we came together and challenged the establishment, we started to became very vocal about what we wanted, we said “listen we are here and we are not gonna go away, we want exhibitions too”. But that was because we could see there was this divide and rural sort of mentality still existing, so we had to agitate for gallery spaces and important exhibitions to take our work on board. We would challenge curators and say “Why isn’t there any aboriginal Art in this show?”. We would just put that on people and they would have to come up with answers and take us seriously.
BCR: So is that the reason why you yourself ended up becoming a curator, and a writer?
FF: Yeah because we realised that the power within art didn’t always remain with the artists, you had to be proactive in other areas, you had to curate shows, you had to write. I had an opportunity to do some work with the museum of contemporary art in Sydney, we took a show across the Havana Biennial in 1994, and we titled the show “Tyerabarrbowaryaou”, it’s a phrase used by a resistant fighter called Pemulwuy, which means “I shall never
become a white man”. He used it against the British during a 14 year resistance fight. I don’t think you can do a show in Australia with a similar title today because it’s so politically conservative, so some of the stuff was very out there and thought provoking.
BCR: From the beginning of your career till today, where now you have the Queensland government supporting your exhibition, do you feel victorious with so much achieved, or do you still feel like not enough has been done.
FF: I still think there’s a lot of work to be done. Indigenous curators in Australia and writers critiquing the work are still few in number. We have a huge number of artists, probably about 7000 aboriginal artists in Australia, with varying degrees of success with their career, from the fine Art market right down to the tourist market end of the spectrum. But I still think we have a long way to go. One of the problems is that we make up 2% of the population. We are very small a number.
BCR: Do you feel like there is still a lot of difficulty being presented to aboriginal artists who want to forge a career. Are the doors really more open?
FF: Oh yes. I think that the in rise that the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative made looking back 20 years now from when they formed. A lot of doors are open for young people to have careers in Art and work within those institutions plus state national.
BCR: I read somewhere that when you studied no one encouraged you to research your roots. Now with all the things that have been achieved does the government/the educational system work on that as well?
FF: No, you can sort of self direct your own education and your own career, no one pushes you. Actually I preferred not to know too much, they would want pretty images. So because of the type of work that I do I got a reputation for being political and outspoken back home. Sometimes that comes with a price, but I’ve been fortunate enough to still forge a career and I haven’t been blocked too much. But the doors are very open for young people coming up through the ranks and for those who want to study in Art school then pursue a career. We now have this tournament back home which is for
emerging artists, there are prizes to help them kick off their career very quickly within the commercial area of the gallery system.
BCR: You said there are still blocks in your art, what do you mean by that?
FF: I just have to be very strategic about what I do, for example there is a public art work that I did back home in the front of the Brisbane Magistrate Court which highlighted 94 different massacre sights in the state of Queensland. I thought long and hard as to whether I should really expose the meaning of that work, and I did contact the Australian news papers Australia last year to tell them what was it about, and I thought this could come at a price where I’m no longer engaged by the State government to do public art work again. So it’s something that I thought about seriously, but luckily I’ve been engaged to do another project.
BCR: What I’ve noticed is that the new government is aware of what happened in the past, and it seems that they are willing to change and embrace their mistakes. Do you feel that people like you have played a big part in raising the awareness that the new politicians have, changing their attitude towards the past and the future?
FF: I think things are very slow to change and if you look at what’s happening internationally we have countries who have come together in terms of the Coalition of the Willing. I mean Australia still has a very conservative government and John Howard has been in power for 10 years. So there are different degrees of what’s accepted and what’s not accepted, we are always manoeuvring through and being strategic about the work that we make. On the one hand the state government it’s a labour government but federally it’s a liberal government which is towards the right.
BCR: In relation to the work you have done around the world, where you are exposing all kinds of racist injustice, how do you feel your Art has been received well?
FF: I think that there has really been good discussion and people have enquiring minds and have asked lot’s and lot’s of questions. And that’s really what I want to try and do, initiate discussion with people about the work, and get them to think a little bit like that film V for Vendetta.
BCR: You sure get people to think, because just here, walking into the gallery a person is confronted with two very powerful images standing in front of each other. On one side there’s the ‘Stud Gins’ with these words ‘Aboriginal’, ‘Woman’, ‘Property’, ‘Defiled’, ‘Discarded’, and on the other the ‘HHH’ series with this reverse Ku Klux Klan. What made you put these works in front of each other, what was the impact you were looking for?
FF: Well it’s difficult because the gallery space is quite tiny, so if the space was bigger I wouldn’t really put them against one another. They are talking about two very different things, they are both very powerful works and they’re competing for attention when you walk into the space. One is based in aboriginal history in the 1920s in Australia. And the other one is more like a contemporary art take on the Ku Klux Klan or more precisely the Hedonistic Honky Haters, so it’s just the way the gallery is formed.
BCR: Standing here between the ‘HHH’ series and the ‘Stud Gins’, I noticed that this work it’s very different from your earlier work, where I got the sense of traditional aborigine Art/imagery. What influenced this change?
FF: I went to an western art school where I have been trained to learn about modern artists in America and Europe. I don’t see my aborigine heritage as something that constrains the type of commentary that I want to make in the world, so whenever I had an opportunity to work overseas I tried to work with people from that particular country and learn from them. For example I worked in America twice and the first time I worked with seminal people in the state of Florida, and the second time I went to New York and I chose to work with people in the African American community. So each time I was quite deliberate in the choice that I made, and how I wanted to make an interjection into the American society at that time.
BCR: So carrying on with this exhibition, what is the message behind the photograph with the gigantic sized words ‘White Trash’ written on a sandy beach of Australia?
FF: There’s an underclass in the Regional Queensland and Regional Australia that no one really talks about. They talk about the aboriginal problem a lot,
imagery is very prevalent in relation to poverty in aboriginal communities but they don’t talk about poverty in white Australia. It’s like it almost isn’t existing. But when I go back to my home town of Hervey Bay I see this underclass of welfare dependent white people who you could consider as white trash, and I heard other white people say to me that they actually refer to their neighbours that way. So really it’s talking about a social economic group in Australia that no one identifies. You have this parallel of wealthy and independent people, and another group of people that carries this readily identified persona that the media gives of in terms of aboriginal people, e.g. being alcoholic, aggressive, the list of things goes on.
The work is very layered, it was easy to get these discarded clothes from an opportunity shop in Hervey Bay and use them to write those words large on the beach at McKenzie Lake in Frazer Island. So basically people come to the work and they bring their own interpretation – it’s multilayered. The work is meant to be provocative and is meant to make you think and it also works with people having an emotional response to it. And so when people look at that and read it, usually their first response is emotional and so you buy into it, and that’s what the work is trying to do – it’s trying to get you to think and have a response rather then this blandness that we see so much in contemporary art.
BCR: The ‘Sign Posts‘…
FF: The jetty wrapped in red tape. That work was conducted over a two day period in a National Park which is a part of my traditional country. We had to take the materials in and bring the materials out. The first day we created it I had already conceptualised the work, and wrapped the jetty in red tape. It’s really a metaphor for the Native Tidal act in Australia, where the aboriginal people have to go through this long legal process to prove that they are the traditional owners for their country. So my clan, the Wondunna Clan have had a Native Tidal application in since 1997, that’s 10 years and we haven’t progressed the claim very far. A lot of people in Australia are locked up in this process of trying to get their native title over their traditional country.
BCR: Well since we have talked about your history, what inspires your art, and this exhibition, is there any message you would like to give to our readers that might not be aware of your work?
FF: I’m aware that a lot of people won’t know who I am in this context here. I just hope the interview is enough to intrigue them and come along and have a look at the work and think about things a little bit differently.
Strange Fruit
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood and leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange Fruit hanging from poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The building eyes and twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop
Here is a strange fruit and a bitter crop
For BigCityRedneck.co.uk
I arrive with a French translator at the October Gallery to find Hassan Massoudy in the middle of a photo shoot for another magazine. On the way here Peggy (the translator) has been telling me how he’s so loved and popular in France. He receives us with a warm smile and I’m slightly taken back by his presence. He’s an elegant man that exudes confidence and wisdom in his posture, his voice and his walk. But he’s also very simple and welcoming.
BCR: How did you get involved in Calligraphy?
HM: Live shows really bring out loads of emotion and I like to work with that. After that show I carried on alone or collaborating with others. Recently I did a show in front of 15000 people in Istanbul with another artist. Having all those people in front of you really inspires you a lot.
BCR: In the western culture sometimes we are made to believe that people that go into the study of Calligraphy do it as a way to find enlightenment…
I met with Jonathan Lasker, controversial abstract artist at Timothy Gallery, Bond Street, to talk about his exhibition Studies for Paintings 1986-2006, that will be showing until the 16th June.
BCR: Do you think the reason you are turning towards white is to do with the fact that unconsciously you are turning towards a minimalist side of abstract after playing around for so many years?
Jonathan Lasker goes to say that when he was still studying he was influenced in his work by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg’s way of thinking. His paintings and the mark his trying to make are very different, but their hands off approach and cruel relationship with gestural brush work is very similar. He feels quite connected in some ways to the dissonant off beat jazz of Felonious Monk. Lasker admires the work of young artist Katie Pratt who shared an exhibition with him at the John Hansard Gallery in Northampton. And though he hasn’t seen her paintings, he found her illustrations very interesting. He also finds the work of Fabian Marcaccio very exciting, but goes on to admit that unfortunately he doesn’t get to see as much art as he would like to.