Heartland
Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne
Solo exhibition September 2001

In Winter 2001 I created a series of artworks about movement through time and space. 

They were slightly nostalgic works, tinged with some sadness about the impossibility of a return to my culture as it once
was before Europeans arrived in Tasmania. At the same time they were exploratory in medium and showed
an embrace of the materials that remain mine culturally to work with and through which to express myself.

The resulting pieces were expressions of much physical joy of the return to my maternal homeland and the satisfaction
of being able to find and work with local materials in a fluid way that resulted in an entire exhibition
of interconnected stories. These works converted the gallery space into a kind of doorway into other worlds.

The art provided a viewer the means to see and negotiate what I experienced in north east Tasmania, which was,
more than one space and more than one time occurring simultaneously.  I felt the past, present, future converge
in shimmering congruency in that country.   The art works were my versions of portals to times past, practices
past and those ways of living that the time of the residency enabled me some understanding of.

These works were all made ensite during a Wilderness Residency at Eddystone  Lighthouse in North East Tasmania.
I lived alone in the lighthouse cottage and created the works over some months.
The materials were collected at Lake St Clair in central Tasmania, on the Midlands Highway during road widening
works and from coastal areas of the north east corner of Tasmania.

One name by which the north east of Tasmania is traditionally is Tebrikunna. Tebrikunna is my traditional homeland
on my mother's side of the family. The original name of my people are the Trawlwoolway people.
We survived, ironically, due to our women, some two hundred years ago, being kidnapped by  sealers and whalers
from the UK, USA and New Zealand. These women were kept moving across the  Bass Strait Islands to Mainland
Australia, further afield to King George's Sound and even across to Mauritius. This mobility kept some of our people out of
the reach of the Van Diemen's Land and colonial government's net, a net that most Tasmanian
Aboriginal people experienced by the 1830s when captured, removed from mainland Tasmania and taken to
Flinders Island where most succumbed to respiratory  illnesses.