Painting Invasion and Colonisation: Provisional Evocations of the Past

Abstract

This studio-based research explores how painting can act as a vehicle for my reflections on the invasion and colonisation of Tasmania. The project brings together three fields of inquiry: the history of invasion and colonisation in Tasmania, contemporary politics, and the history and contemporary practice of painting. My research questions focus on exploring how aspects of each field touch and animate each other and how painting might delve into important problems of a complex, contested and violent history. Distinctively, this studio research responds to extensive reading of both primary sources such as the journals of George Robinson, and current perspectives on our contact history. The contemporary historical studies I reference include Lyndall Ryan’s The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Henry Reynolds' Fate of A Free People and A History of Tasmania, Patsy Cameron's Grease and Ochre, Graeme Calder’s Levee, Line and Martial Law, and James Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land. In reflecting on the written record through drawing and painting in the studio, I discuss the potentials, limitations and implications of working from primary sources as compared with historical scholarship. The intersection of questions of history and painting demands my discussion of key examples of history painting: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jacques-Louis David, Francisco Goya, Edouard Manet, Sidney Nolan, and Gordon Bennett. These artists each developed their own methods for vividly animating significant moral narratives from their milieus. Most importantly, the sorts of compositions, aesthetics, and processes they utilise reflect each artist’s relationship with their society and history. Given the evident impossibility of definitively recreating or depicting specific events from our past, I have developed a process for evoking the lived experiences of historic events while not depicting them in detail. I draw on TJ Clark’s work on discuss the principles of contingency, Raphael Rubenstein on provisionality in painting, and Michael Fried’s theories of absorption and embodiment as all having contributed significantly to my approach to the painting process. This exegesis tracks a period of sustained experimentation through which I develop a process contingent on a multiplicity of texts, my studio experiences, and my imagining of the events to develop a contemporary painting practice as an uncertain, open and honest engagement with the brutal realities of our past.