Indigenous Art Program 2022

Jody Rallah is a Yuggera, Biri Gubba, and Warangu person of the Brisbane and Bowen regions of Queensland. Rallah is an Indigenous Australian artist who works with a variety of mediums and practices, across object making, sculptural installation, painting, sound and performance. Rallah creates knowledge vessels as living embodiments for conversations spanning between generations, by exploring the aliveness of materiality and story. Lived experiences through making and community engagement are core to her process by opening dialogues of exchange and celebrating cultural wealth. Rallah enquires how materiality and experience can affect relationships between place, place and time.

Kyra Mancktelow is a Ngugi, Nunukul woman of Minjerribah and Mulgumpin through her father's line - two of three clans who are the traditional custodians of Quandamooka, also known as Yoolooburrabee, the people of the sand and sea. Through her mother's ancestry, she has connections to the Mardigan people of Cunnamulla. Mancktelow's practice includes printmaking, ceramics, and installation - each applying a unique and distinct aesthetic. Mancktelow works with various materials to share her rich heritage, stories, and traditions to educate audiences and strengthen her connection to Country.

Quandamooka woman Elisa Jane Carmichael is a multidisciplinary artist who honours her saltwater heritage by incorporating materials collected from Country, embracing traditional techniques, and expressing contemporary adaptations through painting, weaving, and textiles. She comes from a family of artists and curators and works closely with her female kin to revive, nurture, and preserve cultural knowledge and practice. Elisa is a descendant of the Ngugi people, one of three clans who are the traditional custodians of Quandamooka, also known as Yoolooburrabee - people of the sand and sea.

Quandamooka Country comprises the waters and lands of, and around, Moreton Bay. Her practice explores the beauty of nature and surrounding environments, drawing inspiration from her cultural identity and heritage.

This artwork is being shown to honour LaVonne Bobongie's outstanding contribution to Community and with the blessing of her family.

LaVonne Bobongie was of Aboriginal (Olkola), South Sea Islander, Scottish, Fijian and Chinese descent and had a heart for her communities. A freelance photographer for 10 years, she worked closely with Brisbane's local artists, regional and remote communities and internationally.

She also worked across multiple festivals and events and in community organisations and educational institutions in South East Queensland in many different capacities, as well as exhibited in the State Library of Queensland.

Artwork detail: LaVonne Bobongie, Blood Ties (2019).

Boneta-Marie is a contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual artist that focuses on many controversial themes. Her artworks take a critical view of social, political and cultural issues based on subjects that directly and indirectly affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children.

Boneta-Marie's artworks cover a wide range of diverse subjects. While using a variety of multimedia, the processes in each of her projects narrate her consistent methodology. Although there may not always be material similarities between different projects, they are linked by recurring formal concerns through the subject matter.

Dylan Mooney is a proud Yuwi, Torres Strait and South Sea Islander man from Mackay in North Queensland. He works in painting, printmaking, digital illustration and drawing.

Influenced by history, culture and family, Mooney responds to community stories, current affairs and social media. Armed with a rich cultural upbringing, Mooney now translates the knowledge and stories passed down to him, through art. Legally blind, the digital medium's backlit display allows the artist to produce a high-impact, illustrative style with bright, saturated colour that reflects his experiences with keen political energy and insight.

Melissa Standard is a multi-disciplinary artist, poet, jeweller, researcher, and curator. Storytelling is an important part of her culture and heritage as a Yuwaalaraay, Gamillaraay and Koama woman. Through narrative expression, she shares her personal narratives and lived experiences and expresses cultural and collective traumas. Although her subject matter is often confronting and difficult, Stannard's aim is to find poetic healing for herself and the community's lived experience, through engagement with themes of identity, belonging, memory, trauma, abuse, and ultimately, survival. With a deep passion for caring for Country, connecting with place and the layered stories embedded within, Stannard is often immersed in nature as it helps balance out the tough topics she works on, and to explore the cultural practice of Winangali or deep listening.

Chris Bassi (born 1990, Brisbane, Australia) is an artist of Meriam, Yupungathi and British descent. Working with archetypal models of representational painting, his work engages with the medium as sociological and historical text and as a means to address issues surrounding cultural identity, alternative genealogies, and colonial legacies in Australia and the South Pacific. Through critical reimagining, his paintings become a space for a type of speculative storytelling that considers questions of history and place and the entangling of personal and collective experience.

Sam Harrison is a Brisbane-based artist with both Indigenous (Kamilaroi/Wiradjuri) and English ancestry. His practice spans several different themes from identity, politics and history to memes and a desire to understand the function of humour. Each of these areas of inquiry sit within the complicated and ambiguous space that exists between First Nations and colonial ways of being. In this space, there are nuanced moments of contact, conflict and co-existence which have created stories that are often painful, sometimes funny, and always worth listening to.

Keemon Williams is a queer interdisciplinary Meanjin (Brisbane) based artist of Koa, Kuku Yalanji and Meriam Mir descent. He utilises a diverse range of mediums and performative elements to interrogate the relationships between location, personal histories and the manifestation of culture in a post-colonial world. His practice seeks to critically examine facets of his identity and its intrinsic tethering to the wider context of being 'Australian', responding to realms of architecture, cultural production and pseudo-ethnic representations.

Tori-Jay is an established Indigenous Australian illustrator and artist based in Brisbane. Growing up she opening shared both her Torres Strait Islander and English heritage, which is often reflected in her contemporary Indigenous art practice. She produces work based on her family and siblings as a way of understanding herself, her appearance and her racial identity. Tori-Jay also produces a lot of illustrative work that conceptually explores deeper human emotions. These works are often drawn as longingly expressive, exaggerated cartoon characters. Over the years, Tori-Jay has honed her skills in digital illustration, drawing, painting, printmaking and film, while also expanding her skills as a mural artist.