Palawa artist Mandy Quadrio exposes Australia’s historic and continued denial of the existence of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In Quadrio’s sculptural installation, Holes in history, abrasive steel wool becomes a metaphor for the erasure and ‘whitening’ of black women, and the scrubbing out of Indigenous histories. These, alongside other works, pay homage to the knowledge and resistance of palawa women.
Mandy Quadrio
As a proud palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) woman connected to my ancestral home of tebrakunna in the North-East of Tasmania, my art practice brings attention to palawa cultural heritage, stories and lived experiences. Working across sculpture, installation and mixed-media, I critique silences and omissions in Australian history in order to overcome stereotypical ideologies that have been falsely held about my people.
By combining objects of my material culture such as bull kelp and river reed to ground my practice, along with found objects and manufactured materials to reference colonialism, my art responds to specific repressed historical encounters in order to empower Indigenous experience. I use my own historic and contemporary personal family history as well as archival records to explore, expose and speak to broader issues of Australian Aboriginal histories. My works are made to assert my sovereign status.
OPENING: 11 July 2018, 6pm
ARTIST TALK: 18 July 2018, 6pm
