Artwork recalls Queensland’s history – QAGOMA Blog

From dugonging (1847–1969) to mineral mining (1949–2019), sector has had disastrous cultural and environmental ramifications on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island). In The tide waits for no one 2020–21 (illustrated), Megan Cope addresses these sophisticated social histories, inspecting their impacts on the land and on generations of its Regular Proprietors, the Quandamooka people.

At the transform of the twentieth century, Minjerribah grew to become home to a booming dugong market that created oil, bones, hides and meat. Early colonists worked with Quandamooka persons to create dugong oil that was commercialised and exported. Evidence of that now-banned industry — outdated glassware and brittle bones — can be uncovered across the island’s landscape, significantly in eroding dunes.

Megan Cope ‘The tide waits for no one’

DELVE Further: Come across out much more about the artists in ‘Embodied Knowledge’ 

To recall this background, Cope has diligently forged outdated dugong bones found on the island in murky gray glass. Even though the artist could have created the casts with glass created from newly mined silica — taken from locations this kind of as Minjerribah — instead Cope has selected to use glass tubes from cumbersome cathode-ray tube televisions. Given that they incorporate a higher concentration of direct, these units are tricky to recycle Cope, even so, presents this content new lifetime.

The tide waits for no 1 factors to the will need to produce industries and artworks that are respectful to the ecosystem.

Edited extract from Embodied Awareness: Queensland Contemporary Artwork, QAGOMA, 2022 offered from the QAGOMA Retail store and online

‘Embodied Knowledge: Queensland Contemporary Art’ is in Queensland Art Gallery’s Gallery 4, Gallery 5 (Henry and Amanda Bartlett Gallery) and the Watermall from 13 August 2022 to 22 January 2023.

Acknowledgment of Place
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Present day Art acknowledges the Classic Owners of the land on which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We fork out regard to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and current and, in the spirit of reconciliation, accept the enormous resourceful contribution To start with Australians make to the artwork and tradition of this nation.

It is customary in lots of Indigenous communities not to point out the name or reproduce images of the deceased. All this sort of mentions and images on the QAGOMA Blog are with authorization, even so, treatment and discretion need to be exercised.

Reconciliation Motion Strategy
QAGOMA has introduced its inaugural Reconciliation Action Program (RAP) to guideline its contributions to reconciliation. See the 2022–24 RAP.

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