Sucker Punch

The first piece of advice Joan gave me was to put something heavy in my bag. I’m not a girly girl, I carry totes mostly. Lots of space. The comment came with one of Joan’s signature raised eyebrows as her blue eyes caught the only light in the room. She waited for me to figure out why in the world I would do such a thing. I was new on the Sydney scene, and at that point I was a single woman, often out late at events, and I was telling her how I didn’t trust this new city. Her reply was to travel with something heavy in my bag like a brick, something her father had tasked her with doing as a young woman. The point was that if someone looked dodgy I could clock ‘em, swinging my bag to deliver a hit from a safe distance or just freak them out with strange behaviour. Good advice from a Glaswegian father who was not foreign to the aggression of men. The switch in narrative changed how I felt moving through the city.

Recently, driving home together from Canberra, Joan told me the story of a garage sale she was hosting where a man transgressed the unspoken boundaries of societal propriety, walking up onto her verandah and into her personal space, his energy, expression, large body scary, intimidating and unstable, like he could blow his top off. So Joan decided on the opposite approach. What if I smile widely at him and see what happens? He softened, told her about his bad day and left with arms full of goodies. Again, a shift in the expected narrative.

I point to these two anecdotes because they demonstrate Joan’s considered use of psychological tools in the everyday. What happens if we don’t believe the story we are told?

Colonial Australian stories and images bring up a predefined narrative and suite of emotions. For First Nations people, not many of those emotions are positive. Lots of non-First Nations Australians probably aren’t sure how they really feel either. Unfortunately, many people believe what they are taught to feel in the history books; a tale of colonial conflict, written only by those on one side of the struggle. So as a nation, how do we collectively start to change the narrative? How do we shift our perspective? We start by asking ourselves why we believe what we’ve been told. Recognise it, observe it.

Joan is effervescent and curious in spirit. She has a high vocal register especially when she giggles, which she does often. Her eyes sparkle when she talks about the ocean and its inhabitants. Connection to nature is what makes her feel things so deeply.

Joan is playful but in a way that is pointed and astute. She puts a mannequin head on the passenger seat of her car and tilts it to look out the window in case someone is thinking about breaking in. The uncanny might be just enough to make them change their mind.

Joan has a dry sense of humour that comes left of field and reminds you there is an entire other field to play in. Conversationally, she often pivots abruptly from subject to subject, looking for the different possibilities in a given situation. The ‘what if’ approach allows for thinking that only the imagination can fill. It gets you out of your body’s first reaction. This is the space where Joan plays. We talk for hours at a time about what people were thinking and feeling at points in history. Things got really messed up really quickly. The 19th century, the period from which a lot of Joan’s source images come from, was a time when the colonists on this continent were making big decisions, ones that would affect our nation for generations to come. Joan feels this like a car crash in her body.

In You were my biggest regret: diary entry 1806, Joan makes herself the subject. A woman in deep regret, tenderly holding onto a tree stump, eyes cast down looking into her feelings. In the background is a vista of deforested hills, digitally composited from an 1806 painting of Castle Hill Government Farm in Sydney. Joan opens up the possibility of empathy in hindsight and does what few non-Indigenous people do (at least publicly); she mourns the destruction of Country and points to European exploration and exploitation as the cause. This is powerful because she subverts the iconography used to elevate colonial narratives while telling a story that is closer to her truth. The greed of colonisation has literally changed the landscape forever and as an Australian, she is part of it.

Joan repurposes images that Australians have seen before. A portrait of a gentleman in a double- breasted suit at his desk, sternly looking into the distance. The library in your mind has already attached a story. Joan knows this and uses it as a tool to suck you into her work. I get the creeps sometimes looking at old colonial paintings. I wonder, what evil things did that person do? What reward did his family receive for the decimation of First Nations people? What hauntings do they have? I am multi-racial; Larrakia, Jingili, Filipino. I am also European in heritage. In these moments I have to confront my own conditioning, my own, admittedly biased, thinking towards European people. For others, the experience might be neutral. They might simply recognise him from a school text book, or live in a suburb that bears his name. Those trees came back to me in my dreams, the work which gave the exhibition its title, reminds us that we cannot know the pain of others. A tree stump in fluorescent yellow irritatingly leans just out of the border that surrounds the image; the same Castle Hill landscape from You were my biggest regret, bare from deforestation. The man’s book rests in his lap as he gets stuck in his own head. The title is at the bottom of the work in a similar vein to many artworks of the day. Joan pre-empts the human want to create a narrative from our own experience and instead offers a jarringly emotive provocation – what if his subconscious mind haunts him and the trees come back to him in his dreams? Punched right in the face with our judgements.

Othering in the mind is the birthplace of racism. Allowing a story about others to become the foundation of our identity, simply because we can say what we are not, is the most harmful Eurocentric thought pattern that exists. We are not like them, we are better than them. As someone who is mixed race, harking from both sides of colonial Australian history, I know this is a fallacy of the mind but still feel the effects of these huge lies every day. It is a massive symptom of how my mind has been colonised, and that is very uncomfortable to admit. But it’s far from something I alone do. Most people try not to seek out struggle in their lives, they try to find the stories that justify and contextualise their existence. We are human and we want to feel safe. Artists like Joan mess with our sense of safety by making the familiar uncanny and unrelatable, forcing us to see the true madness beneath.

Joan’s My own piece of paradise prophetically taps into the absurdity of this experience. Have you ever found yourself jealous, bargaining with the cards you were dealt and comparing your life to someone else’s? My own piece of paradise forces us to confront our belief that Country, and what we put on it or in it, can be truly owned. We live on Country until we die, and then our bodies and all our earthly belongings eventually become part of the Earth too. Why do we pretend that isn’t the end game? Everyone and everything becomes part of Country. It owns you. Property ownership is an uncanny and absurd thing, yet it is collectively strived for as part of the Australian dream. Even as that dream has slipped through the fingers of generations of people. And still, there are plenty of TV shows about selling multimillion-dollar homes around the world. We watch them in our rentals. Amid the cost of living crisis. How ludicrous.

I would see Joan more and more as the years went on, and I realised it didn’t make me feel gross as an Indigenous person to see Indigenous people in her work. I thought it was interesting. In View of New Holland 1770 it was the uncanny that drew me in. I had seen the depictions of First Nations people that Joan digitally collaged into this work before, just not so many in one picture. ‘I claim the entire eastcoast of Australia for Great Britain’ is written on the horizon line, with a tall ship in the distance. There are three different Joseph Lycett landscapes in this one work; the First Nations people were sourced from still more. It is so seamlessly stitched together as a fake composition that it looks real. Irony comes to play. Lycett and many other colonial painters made up the landscapes they painted. Joan’s work is a lie made from lies – but it’s closer to a truth that many First Nations people would recognise as real. There were way more First Nations people around when Lycett was working, they were just deleted from the scene. As a composite of lies, Joan’s work is a pastiche of what the colonists did. The biggest lie was the claiming of the coast. A cut and paste of the idea of Britain onto this continent.

The use of fluorescence as a metaphor for colonisation is easily readable across Joan’s practice; some think of it as her signature. I think the uncanny is her true signature. It needs to feel familiar and weird at the same time for it to feel like a Joan Ross work. Collaging together landscapes housed in collections and reproducing portraits of Flinders, Banks, Cook, Solander, Mrs Macquarie and other faces of people we have never met but think we know. Her titles are like a blunt punchline; found quotes from early diaries and accounts, or made-up ones that sound like they could be. As if Joan is letting you read her work and if you still don’t get it, she’s left a hint in the title for you.

I have spoken to Indigenous friends and family about how non-First Nations people add to the narrative about us. Whether well-intentioned or not, when non-First Nations people tell our stories, it can start to reek of paternalism, or worse.

Cultural appropriation can creep into the picture. Generally speaking, First Nations people are done with non-First Nations people telling our stories, putting words into our mouths, showing us what we look like to them. We have been the greatest subject of European scrutiny for over 200 years.

So how can Joan, a European woman, include First Nations peoples and articulate how she feels about what has been imposed on us in her works, without creating another European narrative and perpetuating the ones that already exist? Joan repurposes historical images so as to avoid imagining-up new depictions of First Nations people which could further objectify or diminish blak bodies. She uses images where Aboriginal people were not the main subjects, or were depicted doing things that were not obviously determined by the viewer, coloniser or artist. She uses images where it isn’t completely obvious that the subject didn’t want to be a subject, or was being used to push an agenda. Hunting, eating around the fire, playing, swimming, fishing. Little dwellings, people climbing trees, everyday activities. By using such imagery Joan is re-evidencing what was there in the accounts all along. This is also part of methods First Nations researchers use to revive old practices. We research old accounts, images and texts. Language revival is probably the most obvious example of this, helped through non-First Nations peoples’ thorough recording of our culture. Some of the most detailed accounts are contained in the diaries of 18th- and early- 19th-century explorers, colonists, surveyors and artists. Just as First Nations researchers rely on that material, Joan does a similar thing. Seeking to neither ignore nor intentionally further objectify.

In The beginning of greed, Joan lays bare the devastation of colonisation for First Nations people and Country. It is a heartbreaking image of two women out in their nawi (bark canoe) fishing, fire on their nawi ready to cook fish and take them back to feed their families. But there is a big ship in the distance pulling a net full of fish that fall out of the frame toward the title, THE BEGINNING OF GREED. People who know the story of Barangaroo the fisherwoman and other Cammeraygal women who belong to Sydney Harbour and its surrounding waters understand this image deeper than the bulging net. Barangaroo is a celebrated woman, and much pride is held in her story; the centring of these women in Joan’s work is subtle and in line with how First Nations people remember her.

Joan points out that which historical amnesia has deleted from the Australian consciousness: we Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were here, are here, and there was nothing to claim as yours. That you could lay claim to something was a story you told yourself as a colonial person, and the world believed it because you wrote it down on a fancy piece of paper and told everyone who looked like you and spoke your language that it was the truth.

Joan’s work does more than reimagine situations. But the serious part is up to the viewer; she can only offer a bridge. The serious part happens inside you when the uncanny flips you into yourself. Joan offers a glitch; it’s up to you which switch you flick.

Joan does not offer the same space for thought and reflection when commenting on European actions of the time. She is direct and means what she says. Joan tells me: ‘Colonists collected like addicts. Take, take, take.’ Her work interrogates the collecting mentality as an ongoing disease of greed and superiority complexes. Irony and the uncanny magnifies it. Oh history you lied to me is a catacomb of curiosities, a recreation of the Leverian Museum, which was open briefly in London from 1775–1806 and included many objects from Cook’s voyages. Those collections are now in institutions spread worldwide. Those same institutions continue to collect works of art that speak to who we are as a nation, to reflect back at us what we aspire to be and the people who embody those aspirations.

Portraits can do all of that work on the psyche. They can give us the library of images that defines what we think and feel about ourselves and gives shape to our national identity. The National Portrait Gallery has opened up its collection and Joan is purposefully, intentionally, consciously resituating the portraits known to us and seen in the public domain. Her story is intractably connected to theirs. In this exhibition, her portrait sits next to theirs. As in her own work, Joan uses these portraits to tell a narrative that is a prophetic warning of what was to come, what we grapple with in the now. Climate crisis, racially-based wars that decimate entire populations. Soon there might be so many satellites in our sky Country that we won’t be able to see the stars. Superiority and greed have been steadily killing off entire species, ecosystems and nations of people for centuries. A headless bird can’t sing …

What did we really learn?