2. Foley’s Art Practice
• Foley spends at lot of
time researching and
reading about the
historical and political
past of colonial and
Indigenous Australians.
• She seeks to educate
current Australians
about the concealed
histories of the colonial
past, and uses the
knowledge and truth
about the past that she
discovers to inform her
concepts and
subsequent artmaking
practice.
• Her practice includes
sculpture, photography, video
art, etchings and installations.
3. Foley’s Art Practice
• Foley can be regarded as a
postcolonial artist, as she
deals with the legacy of the
18th and 19th Century
European rule, which had a
negative effect of the
colonised Indigenous people.
• Her practice integrates
personal experiences and
the collective history of her
forebears.
Annihilation of the Blacks (1986), 278 x 300
x 60 cm, National Museum of Australia.
This sculpture installation refers to the
massacres of a number of Badtjala people
near Maryborough in 1861.
4. More of Foley’s Art
Velvet Waters, Laced
Flour (1996). Tin
boxes with salt,
honey, red oxide, fish
bones, and human
hair, strip of flour on
floor.
This sculpture
installation refers to
the practice of early
frontier conflict when
rations of tea, flour
and sugar were mixed
with arsenic and
given to the
Aboriginal people.
5. More of Foley’s Art
Witnessing to silence (2005). Installation
view, Brisbane Magistrates Court. Lotus stems:
Cast bronze, etched pavers. 180 x 140 cm
diameter. Water, stainless steel, laminated glass.
The work incorporates three elements: cast
bronze lotus lilies that emerge from ethereal
mist, stainless steel columns embedded with ash
in laminated glass panels, and etched place
names in granite pavers.
The element of fire and water symbolise the
common practice of covering up the evidence by
getting rid of the bodies.
During the planning phases Foley intimated that
the work referred to Australian bush fires and
floods.
6. More of Foley’s Art
Witnessing to silence (2005). Installation
view, Brisbane Magistrates Court. Lotus stems:
Cast bronze, etched pavers. 180 x 140 cm
diameter. Water, stainless steel, laminated glass.
Once the work was completed, however, she
revealed to The Australian that this piece was
actually a memorial to the many massacres of
Aboriginal people which had taken place, during
the colonial settlement and expansion of
Queensland in the early 19th Century.
A trenchant critic of colonial policies and
practices, Foley employs a number of artistic
strategies to convey her political themes.
Witnessing to Silence as a public installation acts
as a memorial to those massacred in the state of
Queensland.
7. More of Foley’s Art
Witnessing to silence (2005). Installation view,
Brisbane Magistrates Court. Lotus stems: Cast
bronze, etched pavers. 180 x 140 cm diameter.
Water, stainless steel, laminated glass.
“Fiona Foley is known for inserting coded
messages in her commissioned works.”
Nancy Sever
“Of her public artworks, Foley says her theme has
been to retrace indigenous footsteps and write
an Australian nation, a person or an historical
event back into Australian history. In the 21st
century, more than ever, Australian history can
wield power.”
Bronwyn Watson Public
Works Sydney Morning
Herald 16th Oct. 2010
8. More of Foley’s Art
Edge of the
Trees(1995).
Sculptural
installation by Fiona
Foley, and the non-
indigenous artist
Janet Laurence.
This award-winning
public art
installation evokes
the cultural and
physical history of
the site, before and
after 1788: a pivotal
turning point in our
history, when First
Contact and
invasion /
colonisation took
place.
9. More of Foley’s Art
Edge of the
Trees(1995).
Sculptural
installation by Fiona
Foley, and the non-
indigenous artist
Janet Laurence.
Her artistic practice
not only seeks to
restore Aboriginal
people to history
but also critiques
prevailing cultural
assumptions about
identity and
belonging.
10. More of Foley’s Art
Sydney Cove by unknown artist
(1794).
The city of Sydney is predicated
upon the dispossession of
Aboriginal people – their loss
underpins the city‟s foundation
and growth as it expanded over
more and more if their country.
Their dispossession was instant
too. The year 1788 is a fatal
turning point, where black
„prehistory‟ is neatly sheared off
so that the white „history‟ of city-
making can begin.
It‟s a powerful
date, archaeologists use „at 1788‟
for the way Aborigines lived
before Europeans arrived.
11. More of Foley’s Art
Photograph of where the the installation is located in Sydney.
The site of this installation is very important, as it was the site
of first contact, conflict and dispossession.
A 'forest' of 29 massive
pillars – sandstone, wood
and steel – cluster near the
museum entrance.
Wooden pillars from trees
once grown in the area
have been recycled from
lost industrial buildings of
Sydney.
12. More of Foley’s Art
The names of 29 Aboriginal clans from around Sydney correspond to the 29 vertical poles. Walking
between the pillars you hear a soundscape of Koori voices reciting the names of places in the
Sydney region that have today been swallowed up by the metropolis.
13. More of Foley’s Art
Organic materials such as human hair,
shell, bone, feathers, ash and honey,
are embedded in windows within the
pillars, evoking prior ways of life.
Natural and cultural histories are
evoked by the names of botanical
species carved or burnt into wooden
columns in both Latin and Aboriginal
languages, along with the signatures
of First Fleeters.
Place names are engraved on the
sandstone pillars in English and
Aboriginal languages.
The signatures of crew and convicts of
the First Fleet, which arrived in Sydney
Cove in 1788, are engraved on zinc
plates.
14. More of Foley’s Art
Opening Day, Australia Day. (26th of
January, 1995)
Because Foley‟s installations such as Edge
of the Trees encourage the audience to
wander around the installation, the
audience is physically as well as
emotionally engaged, and thus the
Conceptual Framework is called into play.
In such an installation as Foley‟s Edge of
the Trees 1995 the audience becomes
physically part of the artwork, and the
artwork becomes part of the audience‟s
world.
Thus the boundaries between the agencies
of the Conceptual Framework become
blurred.
15. Homework
• How is the audience essential to Fiona Foley and Janet
Laurence’s Edge of the Trees installation?
• 500 words, submit via email, due next Theory lesson.
