Four Women (I Do Belong) Double

four wOmen: (i do BelONg) double

four wOmen: (i do BelONg) double

four wOmen: (i do BelONg) double C UR ATED BY DJON M UN D IN E

29 October – 10 December 2017

Contents

7 Foreword

4

10

Djon Mundine essay

18

Virginia Fraser essay

22

Contributing Artists

24

Karla Dickens

30

Fiona Foley

34

Teena McCarthy

38

Romaine Moreton

44

Nasim Nasr

48

Therese Ritchie

54

Carolyn Strachan

58 Wart Previous spread Therese Ritchie Isa McDinny, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

This spread Lou Bennett performing Black Arm Band’s Dirtsong, Darwin Festival 2011 photograph: Elise Derwin

62

List of works

64 Acknowlegements

5

Foreword Brett Adlington Director, Lismore Regional Gallery

6

When considering the exhibition that would open the new Gallery — great consideration needed to be made to ensure the project signified our simultaneous new and continued direction. ‘New’ as in providing a more enhanced platform for the visual arts in the region; and ‘Continued’ meaning the path the Gallery had been working through the past 10 years, and which has, I believe, placed us in a position where we are known for presenting some challenging contemporary art projects.

I also wanted to ensure that this major new (and long sought after) redevelopment strongly recognised our place on Bundjalung country.

To that end, Djon Mundine was the logical person to engage. Not only is he one of Australia’s most highly regarded curators, but as a Bundjalung man it made complete sense for us to work with him.

As always, Djon has devoted a deep sensitivity to this exhibition, bringing some highly known and significant artists — alongside some that may be new to viewers.

The inclusion of text and film heightens his narrative — which is an exploration of the role of women in society, and in particular — the ever-present struggle of being a woman of colour.

Taking as it does Nina Simone’s 1966 song, Four Women, the exhibition likewise charts the legacy of past injustice — and how it manifests into contemporary injustice.

The result is at once an elegiac exhibition — but one resounding with power and intelligence.

My deep gratitude goes to Djon for working with the Gallery once again, and to our curator Kezia Geddes for assisting him. Thank you to all the lenders and gallerists for accommodating the loan of works. Thank you also to Virginia Fraser for her insightful essay about the exhibition and Djon’s curatorial approach.

My thanks also is extended to the Gordon Darling Foundation for their belief in and support of this exhibition and publication.

Finally — thank you to the artists involved for continually pushing society to see in new ways: Fiona Foley, Karla Dickens, Romaine Moreton (with Lou Bennett), Wart, Therese Ritchie (with Jacky Green and Seán Kerins), Nasim Nasr, Teena McCarthy, Carolyn Strachan (with Alessandro Cavadini).

Romaine Moreton performing One Billion Beats, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney 2016 photograph: Heidrun Lohr

7

8

9

Fiona Foley Black Velvet 2015 inkjet print on HahnemĂźhle paper 80 x 60cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane

Four Women: (I do belong) Double Djon Mundine OAM Curator

10

Music just can’t be about the art, but it has to be an expression of the good, bad, and ugly in life…

Nina Simone from Nina Simone: Four Women

This year (2017) is the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Australian Referendum where Australian citizens overwhelmingly voted for Aboriginal people to be counted in the Australian census as human beings. Many ideas were moved by Aboriginal people ourselves in that decade and the 1970s. The creation of the Aboriginal Medical Service (1971), the Aboriginal Legal Service (1970), and the Black Theatre (1972). In 1963 the people of the clans of Yirrkala ‘mission’ painted what is called the ‘Bark Petition’ for Australian Parliament to claim their prior ownership to land in east Arnhem Land and begin the process of the recognition of Aboriginal ‘land rights’.

Some writers say that this was the time of ‘second phase’ feminism that was part of a wider liberal rights struggle with the Anti-Vietnam War and African-American Civil Rights movements, and the passing of the equal rights constitutional amendment in the USA, and Australian women being granted equal pay (on paper) in 1969.

In 1963 in Alabama in the southern USA, four young Black girls (Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair, and Addie Mae Collins) were killed when the 16th Street Baptist Church they were in was bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. An infuriated Nina Simone markedly moved her creative action to a more political one. She then wrote a number of songs in response, including: Mississippi Goddam (1964), Young, Gifted, and Black (1970), and Four Women (1966), for the four women they may have become.

It beggars belief now, but in the 1960s Australian women couldn’t obtain a housing loan from a bank without a letter from a male indicating that they were of stable, respectable character. This is no longer practiced.

Important, sometimes almost unnoticed social and legal shifts liberated women in Australia over the 1960s–70s decades. The most important was the availability of the oral contraception drug; The Pill, that was released to

the population in 1961. In 1970, Australian intellectual Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch, one of the most important writings of the twentieth century.

A group of Aboriginal activists, feeling Aboriginal people weren’t treated as Australian citizens, but practically as foreign people, set up a tent; the Aboriginal Embassy, on the front lawn of Parliament House in 1972. In Alessandro Cavadini’s 1972 documentary film; Ningla A-Na (Hungry for our land), which captures the Aboriginal political movement of the times, (including the Tent Embassy), a group of Aboriginal women tell several ‘white’ feminist women how they don’t believe in dividing the Aboriginal movement at that time on gender lines, and remind them of colonial ‘white’ women’s complicity in the colonial process.

In 1959, the film adaption of Tennessee William’s Suddenly Last Summer was released. In the dark Southern Gothic, the young Catherine character is confined to a private mental hospital to be lobotomised to prevent her from telling ‘the truth’ of her aunt, and her cousin’s dark crimes. Historically it was a practice to control women by deeming uncontrollable women as insane and consigning them to institutions for the insane.

From early on my father talked to me like an adult. One of the early things he did was to teach me the Latin names of the parts of the body. He was very analytic. We had

no money, but intellectual curiosity was encouraged, and my parents constantly talked with each other. This develops the brain. I remember listening and thinking, listening to voices talking, talking, talking … My father died of cancer but lived long enough to see me famous, though not long enough to read my book fully.

Camille Paglia, Playboy interview (May 1995) At the 2016 Cementa Festival at Kandos I saw Wart perform an unscheduled but insightful, wistful, readingperformance concerning the relationship with her father and mother. Wart was born near Geelong in 1958, one of five children to surgeon Dr Bob Waterhouse and his wife Barb. The children were nick-named ‘Wart’ from an early age, a moniker that stayed with her since.

Wart came to study art and design at Deakin University before heading to the active art scene of inner city Sydney in 1979. Her career history was so active, rich and broad in that scene. It defies description but included painting, installation, using found art objects, cartoons, performance, initiating art co-operatives, studios and residencies and designing posters and t-shirts for pop bands of the time (including The Cockroaches, Mental As Anything and Midnight Oil). With the photographer Ken Duncan she co-won an Aria award for Midnight Oil’s 1987 Diesel and Dust album cover. At the end of the 1980s she had to

11

12

slow down after being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and in 1988 was taken to Gladesville Hospital for psychiatric assessment. From 1995, she was admitted to Callan Park Hospital for the Insane.

Continuing her art practice, she rationalised her life as an artist (having established herself as a ‘name’ artist), and her need for self-care in dealing as an independent adult with her now recognised illness. She has exhibited widely and often since, including a residency at the Bundanon Trust in 2004 and in Venice in 2007. Artbank curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham described the self-portraits of Secret Phases of Fear (2005); “depicting an escalating manifestation of mania during paranoiac states – moving from raw figuration to smeared abstraction”.1 Or as curator Anne Loxley describes the series “a slow revelation of naked agony”.2 Throughout history slaves, lower classes and outsiders (‘the other’) have been branded or marked in some way with subtlety, but more often brutally and blatantly. The Iranian passport of photographer and installation artist, Nasim Nasr, contains forty pages, and her portraits show her journey on leaving Iran and attempting to find permanent residency in another country — travelling from place to place, being bureaucratically defined and marked forty times until she is practically unrecognisable and may never escape the internal scars of this marking.

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia was the only country in the

world to bar women from driving until this year (2017).

Women will from next year be not merely compliant passengers but ‘be in the driver’s seat’.

In the 1980s, when I lived in Ramingining-Arnhem Land, the male ‘white’ Australian Adult Educator gave lessons to the local Aboriginal women working in the town Council office to obtain their driving licence. This gave them control over the highly valued, Council vehicle fleet.

In the 1960s at the time of the Referendum there were few women (and fewer Aboriginal) curators or film directors.

In the late 1980s when artist Fiona Foley and her fellow Boomalli co-operative founders started, they were shunned by State institutional and commercial galleries, and so they ‘curated’ their own exhibitions. This power position of ‘curator’ or film director is now recognised as the key creative, enabling position. It was something the feminist movement realised from these times, and, that if all oppressed people were to be given a voice, they needed to allow ‘all’ to be ‘there’. It was a principle Carolyn Strachan and Alessandro Cavadini passionately believed in, and which I think is strongly evident in their direction of the 1981 Two Laws film, where the Aboriginal players aren’t merely subjects but centrally retain the ‘active voice’.

Almost forty years on in 2017, activist curator Therese Ritchie has collaborated with academic Seán Kerins and Aboriginal artist Jacky Green in curating the Open Cut

exhibition. On invitation, they worked to allow the Garawa traditional land-owning people of the Borroloola region of the south-western Gulf of Carpentaria a voice in their fight against the colonial weight from the government and a Swiss-owned company, who were open-cut-mining and poisoning their land on the McArthur River.

Palmer and how the investigation into her death uncovers a society of drugs, corruption, hypocrisy and immorality, the truth of the history of a small country town.

Karla Dickens’ hero images for the exhibition; her Sleeping Beauty quartet, honour the memory of a series of young women murdered in the Northern Rivers region, in some cases famous and current, others a little distant, but people we often know and strongly feel for, in what is a beautiful physical and potentially socially creative region.

Haptic specificity is the concept term, that you only allow certain other individuals into your personal space to touch your body. In Aboriginal society only certain other members of your society paint your body design on your body — they are in a specific spiritual and personal relationship to you. The painting also creates a relationship between you and the site in the land the paint comes from. The men and women in Therese Ritchie’s subject directed photo portraits were painted with those words by those correctly tied individuals in their society, as with what is ritually practiced. If the earth is female; ‘my mother the earth’, it also has special spiritual spaces that can only be touched by people in this spiritual relationship to it. Who do you allow to mark that ‘earth body?’

Teena McCarthy’s Ophelia self-image Whatevahappentu Wiipitja Noongu (Barkindji woman) was directly inspired in its form by a small publicity article ‘Whatever Happened to Laura Palmer’, but broadened the hidden murder in her work to comment on the unrecognised massacres of her Barkindji people in the colonisation of the upper Darling River.

In a truly civil society it is a common right for every member of that society to be able to move freely about in their daily work and social lives without being assaulted, robbed or raped, or even to be in fear of such attacks. In 1992 David Lynch’s psychological-horror film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was released. The film’s story line follows the last week in the life of murdered fictional teenager Laura

African-American Black Power writer Eldridge Cleaver’s important autobiographical-self confessional text Soul on Ice (1968) tells his story of the meeting line of black-white races in the USA from a black man’s point of view. He initially defends his raping of white women as a political action in a colonial race war but shifts ground to see the pointless, immoral violence of this practice. Early in the

I don’t want nothing black but a Cadillac, said one 3

13

14

book he reviews another face of this crossing of race when he asks his fellow black prisoner colleagues their race preferences of women as sexual and/or life partner.

Some preferred white women, some, Japanese, some Chinese, but to his surprise, though his fellow prisoners were all black, none preferred black women.

In an Australian office where I worked, when the mainly male co-workers had their end of work Friday night drinking sessions, a comment made when the topic of Aboriginals came up was — ‘We shot all the men, and we’re fucking the women out of existence’.

Carine says. I used to wear high heels everywhere! Even if I were making a simple grocery store run, I’d be in stilettos! 4 Fiona Foley’s photo portraits point to the low esteem level of Aboriginal women in Australian society along similar lines. Aboriginal women were called ‘Black Velvet’ in colonial times up to the present. Her Venus #4 (stilettos), from the Sea of Love series, in a form of ‘oppositional gaze’ is a symbol of a confident, sexually alluring Aboriginal woman. She is sexy and knows and revels in it. Privately, Foley related that she felt Aboriginal women can be educated, sophisticated, well-travelled, and yet, still now, unaccepted socially. As in colonial times; the Black Velvet, which you use but don’t marry.

Fourth phase feminism is I think a return the second phase of striving for equal acceptance within the society.

As a young female colleague privately related to me; “we don’t hate men, we do not imitate men, we have a common ambition to reach an equal, free and safe society for all.”

This includes a recognition of the true colonial history of the last two hundred years and the disempowerment, displacement, and murder of the Aboriginal societies that lived here at the arrival of the first shipment of British convict prisoners in 1788, to create an openair prison for them. A current social debate is taking place internationally on the colonial historical (mainly male) figures the State sees fit to memorialise. I was told by a non-Aboriginal academic that traditionally Aboriginal people didn’t have memorials (nor I guess, anthropologists defining how we are supposed to live).

There are, of course, far fewer statues of women (or Aboriginals) anywhere. Romaine Moreton’s Ragtag 2014 talks of the use of Aboriginal people, particularly women, as tourist fodder, not people we need to talk to or who have feelings we should care for, but a tool, an obscene object, merely to make money.

I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted, tired of ‘having a voice,’ or worse, ‘being a role model,’ Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche.5 Kara Walker, artist statement, 2017

Can art really provide answers, except as a form of their own personal, private relief? Kara Walker’s statement is one of frustration at expectations of providing solutions when we artists (representing ‘the other’) struggle every day with our own realities. But we have to strive to survive if we cannot flourish…

Out of the huts of history’s Shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wonderously clear I rise I rise Bring the gifts that my ancestors gave I am the dream and the home of the slave.

I rise I rise I rise.

Maya Angelou

Notes 1 Daniel Mudie Cunningham, ‘Mental Olympics: in between breaths with Wart’, in un Magazine 11.1, un Projects, Melbourne, 2017 2 Anne Loxley, ‘The Charisma of Schizophrenia’, in Dysart and Fenner (eds.), For Matthew and Other: Journeys with Schizophrenia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2006, p. 42 3 Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, Complete and unabridged, Granada Publishing Limited, London. 1968, p.21 4 Kara Mcgrath, ‘What 9 Real Women Wear When They Want To Feel Sexy’; https://www.bustle.com/p/what-9-real-women-wear when-they-want-to-feel-sexy-67494 5 Kara Walker, ‘Tired of Standing Up, Promises Art, Not Answers’: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/arts/design/kara-walker race-art-charlottesville.html

15

16

17

Jacky Green The Christmas Father, Open Cut series 2017 acrylic on canvas 99 x 92cm courtesy the artist

Talking to the Title about the Curator Virginia Fraser Artist, writer, editor and curator

18

If you call an exhibition Four Women (this show’s original name) you’re almost certainly drawing attention to the fact that either the artists or their subjects are female. You’re doing it, though, without telling us anything else; just leaving the information hanging in the air, sufficient unto itself. And it’s true that in many Australian galleries (though not this one) to show more than an occasional woman is indeed news warranting a special announcement.

To tell you the truth, when the show’s curator, Djon Mundine, first mentioned the title to me, a cluster of numbered stereotypes popped into my thoughts: the fairskinned trio of blonde, brunette and redhead supposed for decades of western advertising to represent the full range of femininity; recent ads for an international cosmetic company pairing the variously toned (light to dark), perfectly made-up skins of eleven women with vox pops miniaturising some of their personal experiences (“it’s my skin, my story, true match”); a set of six swizzle sticks on a card that a collector of sexist kitsch showed me in New Zealand two decades ago — spiteful plastic caricatures of a naked woman dubbed Zulu Lulu emphasising in silhouette the supposed shape of her breasts, buttocks and stomach at different ages.

The fact that Djon’s title refers to Nina Simone’s Four Women — a song written in 1965 and speaking from named black American archetypes mired in a history of racial hatred — but that it initially made me think of drained feminine stereotypes and namelessness in an exploitative

world of confected appearances and trash alcohol culture just says something about our different life experiences.

I was discouraging about the title, lightly scornful.

Would you get four Aboriginal artists together and call the show Four Aborigines? (Even Nina Simone met resistance to her now iconic work. Her pain-transmitting performances of its poetically sketched characters made it, as American playwright Christina Ham said, “one of her most blistering songs”. When Four Women was released in 1966, it was temporarily banned from some radio stations in New York and Philadelphia for being, Claudia Roth Pierpoint recounted in a 2014 New Yorker article, “insulting to black women”; a ban that “produced more outrage than the song”.)

Four Women as an exhibition has been a bee in the curator’s bonnet — or his beret to be more accurate — for quite a while and, like many of his other exhibitions, probably began in a thought linking contemporary culture and politics with Australian history along unexpected lines.

It’s a curatorial method that seems to work in the way that irritants work in oysters. It produces many exhibitions and essays a year around interesting ideas that are often obliquely approached and sometimes arcane until their author resolves them in the gallery or on the page.

In this case, the method has assembled, around what may have been a piece of feminist grit, a collection of work by eight female artists — Karla Dickens, Fiona Foley,

Wart, Therese Ritchie, Teena McCarthy, Nasim Nasr and Romaine Moreton, one male artist, Jacky Green and artistfilmmaker Carolyn Strachan and their various male and female collaborators. It has produced an exhibition full of individuality, purpose and imagination very far from the minutely graded variations of the same empty thing that the original title suggested to me.

Djon‘s commitment to certain artists has generated a growing, changing, mobile community of artists and works around his exhibitions and his writing about art and culture. Most or maybe all of the artists in Four Women have been in other of his exhibitions, sometimes with the same work put into a different relation, and perhaps this is part of the meaning (I Do Belong) in the middle of the show’s title.

For instance, the last time I saw Fiona Foley’s reworking of the derogatory phrase Black Velvet it was spelt out as a huge set of freestanding letters in the middle of a gallery in Healesville, Victoria. In Lismore in northern New South Wales, the same large words appear more poignantly in a photograph laid out in empty clothes on an empty northern beach (on Stradbroke Island).

Djon is not alone in using Nina Simone’s song to inspire new work. Christina Ham’s 2016 musical drama, Nina Simone: Four Women, has Simone meeting three other women at the site of the fatal 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. The four actors play the song’s four

19

Sleeping Beauty Karla Dickens A still night summer smells wet grass playful freedom disturbed Hunters lurk behind cruel smiles deluded entitlement hateful desire wanting now Sweet dress fresh pink nails clean squeezey hair a hint of rose oil dancing heart 20

characters, but their number also refers to four teenagers killed in the bombing by white supremacist terrorist organisation the Ku Klux Klan.

Ham’s play for young people, Four Little Girls: Birmingham 1963 (first produced in 2012), aimed to engage her audience with the murdered teenagers – Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair, and Addie Mae Collins – as people and not just anonymous symbolic presences.

Ham’s website quotes political activist and author Angela Davis: “What bothers me most is that their names have been virtually erased. They are inevitably referred to as ‘the four black girls’.”

Acts of personification have always been part of Djon’s curating from the 200 funerary poles of the Aboriginal Memorial at the National Gallery of Australia to this exhibition with its multiple faces and figures. In Lismore, the images include Teena McCarthy’s underwater selfportrait with its Mona Lisa-like smile, Wart’s powerfully energised expressionist portraits (or perhaps figurative mood paintings), Nasim Nasr’s photos of her own face gradually covered in passport stamps and Karla Dickens’ quiet and deeply disturbing cloth and paint collages referring to individual murdered Aboriginal women.

Another meaning for the middle part of the title might lie in the interior and exterior connections this show explores and Djon’s loyalty to a sophisticated, international view of the world with Aboriginal people at its centre – at his

centre and the centre of the thinking of most of the artists he works with.

Therese Ritchie’s monochrome portraits of Garawa people from the Borroloola area of the Gulf of Carpentaria show slogans written in dripping white paint on their bodies. The messages address the toxic, Swiss-owned, open-cut McArthur River copper mine that’s poisoning their country, and the resonance of the pictures is in the way your eye is pulled back and forth between the words and the eloquent expressions on the faces of named people above or behind them.

The title I thought of at first as being empty, tells a story about the exhibition’s development as much as its contents, and has become more full.

Notes The CoUNTess Report analyses data on gender equity in Australian art: http://thecountessreport.com.au Christina Ham’s website: http://www.christinaham.com Claudia Roth Pierpoint’s article “A Raised Voice”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/raised-voice The Many Battles of Nina Simone | The New Yorker www.newyorker.com Claudia Roth Pierpont on how the struggle for civil rights shaped Nina Simone’s life and career, and on a controversial new movie, “Nina,” starring Zoe Saldana.

Cruel takers take against protest hard screams wilful violence no permission The breeze stirs moonlight sparkles birds stop petals close gentle rains land Death grip penetrating her soul trails of blood imposing nightmares overpowered Looking back enough movement no more deep silence falls sleep long I leave you flowers love letters gardens of tears butterfly kisses tender hugs and yesterday’s dreams Beautiful then beautiful still

21

22

four wOmen: (i do BelONg) double – KARLA DICKENS / fiona Foley / teEna McCarthy / roMAiNE MORETON / nasim Nasr / theresE RiTCHIE / CAROLYN StraChAN / warT

23

24

karla dickens

25

26

27

This page and previous spread (detail) Karla Dickens Sleeping Beauty I, Black and Blue series 2016 mixed media 120 x 120cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane

Karla Dickens Sleeping Beauty II, Black and Blue series 2016 mixed media 120 x 120cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane

28

29

Karla Dickens Sleeping Beauty III, Black and Blue series 2016 mixed media 120 x 120cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane

Karla Dickens Sleeping Beauty IV, Black and Blue series 2016 mixed media 120 x 120cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane

30

fiona foley

Fiona Foley HHH #8 2004 Ultrachrome print on paper 101 x 76cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane

32

33

Facing page

Above

Fiona Foley School’s In 2015 inkjet print on Hahnemßhle paper 80 x 60cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane

Fiona Foley Venus #4, Sea of Love series 2007 inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper 100 x 100cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane

34

Teena M Carthy c

35

36

37

Previous spread (detail)

This spread:

Teena McCarthy Whatevahappentu Wiipitja Noongu (Barkindji woman) 2016 ochre inkjet print on reused butchers paper 120 x 240cm courtesy the artist

Teena McCarthy with her work in Old Land, New Marks Western Plains Cultural Centre 2016 photograph: courtesy Regional Arts NSW

38

Romaine Moreton

39

Our Love Romaine Moreton You do not get my love And you will not get my hate In this war of attrition That the dagay legislates You think we are voiceless Condemned to depravity You think we will go quietly Live our lives with brevity Let me tell you You do not get my hate And you do not get my love As it is below So it is above 40

We walk our lands Constellations beneath our feet We dance amongst stars Drink the water, salty, brine, and sweet You do not get my love, dagay And you will not get my hate We are born into the Dreaming And it is never too late We are born of the Dreaming And freely determine our destiny, our fate I turn from the dagay Hateful, greedy, and white I shun the oppressor To share my people’s love, vision and light You do not get my love And you will not get my hate I will use this time to love my people And my people, it is never too late Let us love each other Allow the law to rise from the ground and wrap us in her majestic cloak Let us love each other Forgive ourselves our squabbles or for when we misspoke Let us love each other My people Let us love Each other

This spread and previous: Romaine Moreton performing One Billion Beats, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney 2016 photograph: Heidrun Lohr

41

42

43

Romaine Moreton Ragtag 2014 High Definition video duration 8:00 minutes courtesy the artist photographer: Amanda James

44

Nasim Nasr

45

46

47

This spread and previous (detail) Nasim Nasr Forty Pages #2–5 2016 giclÊe digital print 100 x 80cm (each) courtesy the artist and Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide

48

Therese Ritchie in collaboration with Jacky Green and Seรกn Kerins

49

Cain O’Keefe

Gadrian Hoosan

Jacky Green

Jackie Green

Casey Davey

Nancy McDinny

Josie Green

Ian Davey

Karen Noble

Timothy Lansen

Shauntrell Green

Kyeika Neade

Previous spread (detail): Robert O’Keefe

Therese Ritchie Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm (each) courtesy the artist

52

53

Jacky Green Yee-haw, Money trucks, Open Cut series 2017 acrylic on canvas 87 x 100cm courtesy the artist

54

carolyn strachan in collaboration with Alessandro Cavadini

55

56

57

Previous spread and above Carolyn Strachan with Alessandro Cavadini and the Borroloola Aboriginal Community Two Laws 1981 duration 2 hours 10 minutes courtesy the artists

58

wart

60

61

This spread and previous (detail) Wart Secret Phases of Fear 2005 oil on board 39.2 x 38.6cm (each) Artbank collection

List of works Four Women: (I do Belong) Double 29 October – 10 Dec 2017

62

Karla Dickens Sleeping Beauty I, Black and Blue series 2016 mixed media 120 x 120cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane Karla Dickens Sleeping Beauty II, Black and Blue series 2016 mixed media 120 x 120cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane Karla Dickens Sleeping Beauty III, Black and Blue series 2016 mixed media 120 x 120cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane Karla Dickens Sleeping Beauty IV, Black and Blue series 2016 mixed media 120 x 120cm IES Indigenous Art Collection Karla Dickens Sleeping beauty poem courtesy the artist

Fiona Foley Black Velvet 2015 inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper 80 x 60cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane Fiona Foley School’s In 2015 inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper 80 x 60cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane Fiona Foley HHH #8 2004 Ultrachrome print on paper 101 x 76cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane Fiona Foley Venus #4, Sea of Love series 2007 inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper 100 x 100cm courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane Fiona Foley That H Word poem courtesy the artist

Romaine Moreton Ragtag 2014 High Definition video duration 8:00 minutes courtesy the artist

Therese Ritchie Jacky Green, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Romaine Moreton [Four Women] 2017 performed with Lou Bennett at Lismore Regional Gallery 2017

Therese Ritchie Casey Davey, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Teena McCarthy Whatevahappentu Wiipitja Noongu (Barkindji woman) 2016 ochre inkjet print on reused butchers paper 120 x 240cm courtesy the artist

Therese Ritchie Gadrian Hoosan, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Teena McCarthy and Djon Mundine To the River Darling 2016 5:20 min duration (continous loop) courtesy the artists

Therese Ritchie Isa McDinny, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Teena McCarthy and Djon Mundine Song to the River Darling 2016 5:12 min duration (continous loop) courtesy the artists

Therese Ritchie Ian Davey, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Nasim Nasr Forty Pages #2–5 2016 giclée digital print 100 x 80cm (each) courtesy the artist and Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide

Therese Ritchie Donald Shadforth, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Therese Ritchie Timothy Lansen, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Therese Ritchie Scott McDinny, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Jacky Green Yee-haw, Money trucks, Open Cut series 2017 acrylic on canvas 87 x 100cm courtesy the artist

Jacky Green Jerriminni—The Snake Line, Open Cut series 2017 acrylic on canvas 43 x 54cm courtesy the artist

Therese Ritchie Kyeika Neade, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Therese Ritchie Jackie Green, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Jacky Green The Christmas Father, Open Cut series 2017 acrylic on canvas 99 x 92cm courtesy the artist

Seán Kerins & Therese Ritchie Developing the North, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Phototech 2 x 6 metres courtesy the artists

Therese Ritchie Shauntrell Green, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Therese Ritchie Karen Noble, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Jacky Green The Whitefella Chicken-bird dreaming, Open Cut series 2017 acrylic on canvas 47 x 40cm courtesy the artist

Carolyn Strachan with Alessandro Cavadini and the Borroloola Aboriginal Community Two Laws 1981 duration 2 hours 10 minutes courtesy the artists

Therese Ritchie Robert O’Keefe, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Therese Ritchie Josie Green, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Jacky Green Red Country, Open Cut series 2017 acrylic on canvas 96 x 88cm courtesy the artist

Therese Ritchie Cain O’Keefe, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Jacky Green The damage has been done, Open Cut series 2017 acrylic on canvas 40 x 57cm courtesy the artist

Wart Secret Phases of Fear #1–16 2005 oil on board 39.2 x 38.6cm collection of the artist, collection of Eugenia Raskopoulos, and Artbank collection

Therese Ritchie Jacky Green 2, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

Jacky Green The Whitefella Chicken-bird dreaming #2, Open Cut series 2017 acrylic on canvas 46 x 55cm courtesy the artist

Therese Ritchie Stewart Hoosan, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist Therese Ritchie Nancy McDinny, Open Cut series 2017 digital print on Ilford Monofibre Silk 84 x 56cm courtesy the artist

63

Acknowledgements Four Women: (I do Belong) Double Curated by Djon Mundine 29 October – 10 December 2017

Featuring: Karla Dickens, Fiona Foley, Romaine Moreton, Teena McCarthy, Wart, Therese Ritchie (in collaboration with Jacky Green and SeĂĄn Kerins), Nasim Nasr, and Carolyn Strachan (in collaboration with Alessandro Cavadini and the Borroloola Aboriginal Community) Catalogue published by Lismore Regional Gallery 11 Rural Street, Lismore NSW Australia 2480 T. +61(2) 6627 4600 E. artgallery@lismore.nsw.gov.au www.lismoregallery.org ISBN-13: 978-0-6481226-1-6 Catalogue Design: rangestudio.com

Lismore Regional Gallery staff: Brett Adlington, Director Kezia Geddes, Curator Fiona Fraser, Curator Sarah Harvey, Administration Manager Claudie Frock, Learning Officer Marisa Snow, Placemaking Officer (Lismore Quadrangle)

Catalogue credits: The artworks and images are courtesy the artists and their galleries. Images and text are copyright of the artists, writers, photographers and Lismore Regional Gallery. All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact Lismore Regional Gallery for all permission requests.

The publication was generously supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation.

Create NSW is pleased to support and create opportunities for growth to foster the future of arts and culture in NSW.

That H Word Fiona Foley Humbled Humiliated Hurtful Hostile Hatred Harm History, Historic, Historian Human Hero Horror Horrific Home Humour Happy Hip-Hop Horny Hot Harlem Hedonistic Honky Haters Hide Haves/Have-Nots Hunted Humbug Hype