julie gough

INTERRUPTED:
renditions of unresolved accounts

10 august - 8 september 2007

• press release
• price list
• bad language 2 screenprint
• bad language 2 statement
• sentence statement

"Visiting sites of history and memory I rework versions of the past from between the lines, seeking voices and direction in a detective-like search for alternative and visual means of representation"

"I sculpt as my way to retrieve the forgotten or unspoken narratives of this nation, and to invite the viewer to engage with stories and implications perhaps not otherwise voluntarily approached.

My art presents unsettledness as a manifestation of a larger, national psychic discontent. Much of my work refers to my own and my family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people. A key focus of my practice is uncovering and re-presenting historical stories as part of an ongoing project that questions and re-evaluates the impact of the past on our present lives.

The only constant in my life apart from art seems to be my endless sense of movement, somewhat like the tides. Recent works are less about dates and facts and more metaphorically representative of me, now, navigating my reality. A sense of being drawn in different directions, living between and within varied states and places, conveys the mysteries of place, seeming coincidence and the relief and release of locating story and medium in my everyday.

Memory of Tasmania and returning there to my north east traditional country where she-oak and tea-tree provide relief from sometimes intemperate weather are the places, spiritual, psychological and actual, where I find strength to make fresh work often about violent encounter and unfinished business between Indigenous and non Indigenous people across Australia.

Some of my works are celebratory and peaceful renditions of my inner state of being, in flux, between land and sea, not settled in new places, testing waters and finding much. Other pieces respond to historical deception and injustice and are very located in place, time, materiality; drawing strength from making a story come out of the archives into three dimensions to face its audience.

I am drawn also to shorelines; the places between past and present, day and night, conscious and unconscious. My art making navigates these spaces of evocation in an effort to trigger re-surfacings of cultural memories beyond habituated contemporary frameworks that distrust the sensorial.

My feeling is that there is something ‘other’ through which humans individually mediate the world. Working with this spirit of our presence provides me meaning, reason and a way (art making) to engage with an often detached exteriorised public world. My intention is to investigate and provide new ways to reflect upon and hence understand places of time, memory, history and the past within a personal present."

Julie Gough 2007

uninvited interventions

wood, canvas, acrylic paint

198 x 190 x 200cm

2007

$6,000

uninvited interventions

view 2

Some of our women kidnapped by sealers

a. She was sold for one guinea

b. Shard [King Island 2006]

c. Paddle / spear

book, paper, beads, fabric, acrylic on canvas, wood, cord, gunshot, leather, ink

varied dimensions

2007

Some of our women kidnapped by sealers

d. hide

e. Kangaroo Island sealing camps

f. Some of our women kidnapped by sealers

g. King Island sealing camps

book, paper, beads, fabric, acrylic on canvas, wood, cord, gunshot, leather, ink

varied dimensions

2007

$5,500

witness

chair, wood, paper, goat hide, ink

varied dimensions

2007

$4,500

witness

detail

bad language, 2

[1-4]

acrylic on paper

59.4 x 42cm [x9]

2007

bad language, 2

[5-9]

acrylic on paper

59.4 x 42cm [x9]

2007

$4,000

screenprint series of 9, edition of 10 available $2,700

sold ed.1 to murdoch university

sentence [ancestor]

wood, pyrography, soap

varied dimensions [13 pieces]

2007

$2,500 sold to artbank