Painting K’gari now runs up against the problems of the island’s ecological and colonial unsettlements: how does one get a clear view of a place which is burning, recovering, mutating, damaged? But then again in art K’gari has always been a changeful, unstable presence, especially in Sidney Nolan’s complexly menacing paintings of Eliza Fraser (the island’s colonial namesake), in which the island constantly flickers in and out of the background. Putting in dialogue the ghosts of Nolan and his art with ghosts from the family history of the Butchulla artist, these paintings think through how our histories — of K’gari, of art — change as our present burns.
Image: Mia Boe, We are spirits in levity, 2021.
