Uncanny Beauty: Interpreting the Portraits of Julie Dowling

Strange Fruit: Testimony and Memory in Julie Dowling's Portraits

21 July — 14 October 2007, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne.

By Varga Hosseini

Julie Dowling works in a genre of painting that has a prestigious place and history in the Antipodes. The widely-publicised and celebrated Archibald Prize and, more recently, the Blake Prize for Religious Art, attest to the lucrative status and popularity of portraiture and its ability to generate controversy and debate. The past decade has seen Dowling, an Indigenous artist of Yamatji and Budimaya descent, produce engrossing and provocative portraits that have received scrutiny as much for their subject matter as their engrossing and eclectic aesthetic.

Strange Fruit: Testimony and Memory in Julie Dowling's Portraits is the first major survey of Dowling's prolific oeuvre . Curated by Jeannette Hoorn, this momentous exhibition traces ten years in Dowling's career and explores how portraiture serves as a powerful medium for reflecting on family, history, memory, loss and trauma.

Left: Her Father’s Servant (1999),
synthetic polymer paint, red ochre
and blood on canvas, 100 cm X 120 cm,
National Gallery of Australia.

The task of selecting artworks for a show of this nature is a formidable feat given Dowling's prolific output and monumental repertoire of paintings. One of the impressive achievements of this retrospective is that it showcases the enormous scope and diversity of Dowling's vision and her idiosyncratic approach to portraiture. The compilation of sixty-one portraits weaves a lavish tapestry of subjects, among them family members and distant relatives; notable figures in Indigenous Australian history; dispossessed and displaced members of the Stolen Generation; unsung Indigenous Australians, and a selection of intricate and moving self-portraits.

In Aunties with Cards (1999) and Her Father's Servant (1999), Dowling provides insights into her family's history by portraying their activities and tribulations, respectively. In the former portrait, we encounter the commanding matriarchs who dominated the artist's childhood and who are pictured here partaking in a popular pastime: card games such as black euchre, stud and poker. The congested composition of this painting, with its gorgeous chiaroscuro, lush impasto and taut, symmetrical arrangement of figures captures the communal
atmosphere and extended duration of these games which would often stretch for hours or even days. The artist's penchant for drama and tension is superbly realised in Her Father's Servant (1999), a portrait of Dowling's great-grandmother, Mary. In this work, Dowling conveys how Mary's status and position in her father's household dramatically shifted after he remarried. The young Mary appears as a maidservant at her father's birthday party, allocated the task of setting plates for her new stepmother and siblings. Her subservience is powerfully evoked in the skewed perspective of a cramped dining-room, the looming figures of her step-mother and half-sister and her father's frigid demeanour at the harshly illuminated table.

Right:Pemuluwuy (2006),
synthetic polymer paint
and red ochre on canvas,
120 cm X 100 cm,
collection of Ken and Lisa Fehily.

History and memory are powerful currents that have driven Dowling's practice since the inception of her career. One of the distinctive aspects of her portraits is their attempt to illuminate the agency of Indigenous Australians and their history of encounter and exchange with outsiders. There are images in this exhibition that shift the point of focus from Dowling's family to notable figures in Indigenous Australian history, as well as individuals whose achievements havebeen sidestepped by mainstream histories of race-relations in Australia. The nocturnal painting Pemuluwuy (2006), for example, is a portrait of a traditional custodian from the Sydney Cove area who served as a navigator, negotiator and ambassador for his community. Dowling shows the naked and bearded Pemuluwuy setting a plush cornfield ablaze in order to ward off colonialists from encroaching on sacred Eora country. The explosion of light and colour in this painting — flickering, fluorescent yellow, crackling cadmium orange, and tinges of blazing scarlet — accentuate the danger and extremity of Pemuluwuy's role as a custodian.

In Biddy the Midwife (2003), Dowling addresses the pivotal, but largely unrecognised, role played by Indigenous midwives during the early years of Australia's colonisation. The demure female subject of this portrait, Biddy, worked tirelessly as a midwife for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Western Australia. Dowling has positioned Biddy in the garden bed of a colonial settlement surrounded by a thicket of frangipani flowers. The shimmering halo that frames Biddy's head symbolises her humanity, civility and suffering, and her stature as an individual whose life and work is in keeping with that of a saint — even though she has not been ordained as one.

Left: Biddy the Midwife (2003),
synthetic polymer paint, red ochre
and plastic on canvas, 60 cm X 40 cm.

The Christian symbolism in Biddy the Midwife motions toward what is arguably the most renowned and widely-reproduced body of paintings in Strange Fruit : Dowling's Icon to a Stolen Child portraits. In this series of approximately 150 paintings, ten of which have been selected and displayed by Hoorn, the faces of Indigenous children are sumptuously rendered in the format of Russian and Byzantine icon paintings. Icon to a Stolen Child: Fetish (1998) depicts a young Indigenous girl whose face is outlined in the dot and circle symbolism of Western Desert art, while her body is adorned with wings and decorated with the sacred heart of Jesus Christ. Excerpts from the Lord's Prayer float and flicker against the cobalt blue background. In Icon to a Stolen Child: Fire (1998), the face and figure of the subject forms the vertical axis of an imposing Celtic cross. This powerful symbol of Christ's sacrifice (and Christianity more generally) is surrounded by a kaleidoscopic field of dots that symbolise fire. In these icons, visual references to country from Western Desert iconography are exquisitely interwoven with Christian scripture and symbology.

I approach the artworks in this exhibition as a writer working on the borderlines of cultures and disciplines. As an Iranian-Australian scholar versed in art history but perpetually fascinated by theology and spirituality, my encounter with Dowling's images emerged during the course of a doctoral thesis on the representation of Christianity in contemporary Aboriginal art. For some time now, the artist's Icon to a Stolen Child portraits have preoccupied my writing on account of their complex relationship to Christian visual culture and spirituality, and their audacious and stylish transformation of icon painting.

Given their powerful religious symbolism, it is convenient to interpret Icon to a Stolen Child: Fetish (1998) and Icon to a Stolen Child: Fire (1998) as the work of an artist who is a pious and practising Christian. Dowling's strict Catholic education as well as her Jewish and Russian ancestry would certainly lend support to such an interpretation. This reading would, however, sidestep the more fractured and ambivalent place that Christian spirituality occupies in Dowling's life and professional practice. To its credit, this exhibition offers an indispensable framework for understanding the beauty and complexity of Dowling's sumptuous and opulent “icons”. Hoorn's erudite, lucid and engaging catalogue essay, Strange Fruit: Testimony and Memory in Julie Dowling's Portraits , situates the subject matter in the context of the artist's social milieu and history, and interprets the symbolism in relation to topical issues such as trauma, the uncanny and ethics.

Left: Icon to a Stolen Child: Fetish (1998),
synthetic polymer paint and red ochre on
canvas, 40.5 cm X 27.5 cm, private collection.

‘The circumstances that formed her family's life are the strongest force propelling Julie Dowling to paint', Hoorn observes (11). The most exemplary and indelible of these circumstances, and one that forms the premise of her icons, is the forced removal of her family members — and legions of other Indigenous Australians — under the notorious assimilation policy. Dowling remarks: ‘I began painting this series of portraits as a meditation on the lives of individuals who were and are removed from their families through separation by government and religious agencies. I wanted to reflect on this because three generations of my family were forcibly removed through government regimes and church incentives' (Dowling). The Catholic Church, Hoorn elaborates, established one of the most successful missions in its history when it settled in Western Australia: ‘From the late nineteenth-century the church worked in tandem with the state to implement legislation governing the lives of Aboriginal people' (16).

Given this background, Dowling's icons and their choice of subjects make an important and strategic point of departure from the Christian iconographic tradition. In Russian, Greek, Serbian Orthodox and Byzantine churches, icons were perceived as doors or windows onto the divine; living, efficacious images that manifested the divine presence of Jesus Christ and the saints (Hodgkinson and Hodgkinson 1). Significantly, the icon painter, or iconographer, was also a pious Christian whose life and work was inextricably linked with the church's tradition of prayer and devotion (Baggley 16; Hodgkinson and Hodgkinson 16). In Dowling's case, we are confronted with a different demographic and agenda. According to Hoorn: ‘in this series, the artist returns time and again to her disenfranchised countrymen and women, to the fate of those who were taken away, to the victims of a racist law and order system, to her grandmothers whose culture was destroyed' (Hoorn 14).

Icon to a Stolen Child: Fetish (1998) and Icon to a Stolen Child: Fire (1998) depict Indigenous children who were fostered out to white families and who ultimately served, according to the artist, ‘as signifiers of that family's benevolence to the underprivileged within their own faith to the church' (Dowling ‘Notes on Artwork'). These children also signify the immeasurable loss and perennial trauma experienced by members of the Stolen Generation and their families. Dowling herself is emphatic on this point: ‘the policy of forced child removal can still be [seen] as a continuing social trauma which can last up to five generations after the initial removal from close family' (‘Responses to Questionnaire').

Right: Icon to a Stolen Child: Fetish (1998),
synthetic polymer paint and red ochre on canvas,
40.5 cm X 27.5 cm, private collection.

In portraying the young members of the Stolen Generation in the vein of Christian saints, the artist endeavours to convey what she describes as the ‘devastation [caused] not only to the individual but also to the community who are left to grieve the loss of children' (‘Responses to Questionnaire'). Icon to a Stolen Child: Perth (1998) is a case in point. Here, Dowling emphasises the brutality of child removal and its pervasive and enduring ramifications. The subject of this painting is a descendant of the Stolen Generation who, like his forebears, was severed from his kin, placed in juvenile detention and later forced to survive on the streets. The weary face that returns our gaze in this icon is circled by the fluent, sprawling script synonymous with graffiti and street-culture. There is an affirmative, empowering and intersubjective dimension to this poignant and grim portrait. Six socially displaced Indigenous youths from Perth were asked to participate in the production of this painting by inscribing its surface with their intricate and iridescent “tags”.

The deployment of graffiti in this work beautifully illustrates the unorthodox and idiosyncratic nature of Dowling's Christian-related art. Hoorn underlines this aspect of her icons when she argues that they are not so much authentic windows onto the past as distinctively ‘uncanny' works that provoke ‘the viewer to contemplate the meaning of conventional religious iconography' (14). This uncanniness lies in the fact that the Christian subject matter in Dowling's icons constitutes only one element of the dense and exorbitant visual language

Right:Icon to a Stolen Child: Perth (1998),
synthetic polymer paint and red ochre on canvas,
40.5 cm X 27.5 cm, private collection.

The crosses, angels and hearts in Icon to a Stolen Child: Fetish (1998), Icon to a Stolen Child: Fire (1998) and Icon to a Stolen Child: Perth (1998) are ensconced in an entrancing, technicolour textile of signs and references sourced from Celtic and West African art, Western Desert iconography, popular culture and kitsch, biblical citations and hip-hop flavoured graffiti. Even Dowling's pigment shimmers, gleans and glimmers through its vivacious contamination with eccentric substances like blood and plastic.

In foregrounding Dowling's engagement with the Stolen Generation, Strange Fruit compels viewers to recognise the ethical nature of her undertaking and its attempt to facilitate a process of mourning and healing. Hoorn observes: ‘the compulsion to revisit and rework [this theme] through painting can be seen as an affirmative response to violation: it presents the means through which the artist can transcend the orbit of her injury' (6). This use of painting as a medium for healing explains Dowling's fixation with portraiture:

The reason I paint portraits is to break down barriers between individuals. When a person views a portrait, she or he is forced to acknowledge the image of another human being. These images reflect the subject's flaws, their fears, their history, their beauty, their inner-emotion and their existence. (Dowling ‘Taking Control of Your Future' 153)

Emmanuel Levinas famously argued that an ethical relationship with another person begins with, and involves, the face (in Matthews 160). If this is so, then Strange Fruit bears witness to the efficacy of Dowling's portraits in facilitating a relationship to, and understanding of, the history and plight of Indigenous Australians.

Varga Hosseini is a Melbourne-based writer, poet and visual artist. He recently completed a PhD thesis on the representation of Christian symbols and narratives in contemporary Indigenous Australian visual culture. For the past decade he has worked as an arts writer by producing catalogue essays for visual artists and institutions, and publishing articles and reviews in arts journals and magazines.

References

Baggley, J. Doors of Perception — Icons and Their Spiritual Significance . New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1996.

Dowling, Julie. ‘Notes on Artwork from Strange Fruit ', in possession of Varga Hosseini, 2007.

---. ‘Responses to Questionnaire', in possession of Varga Hosseini, 2006.

---. ‘Taking Control of Your Future' Singular Women: Reclaiming Spinsterhood. Ed. Jocelynn A. Scutt. Victoria: Artemis, 1996.

Hodgkinson, P and C. Hodgkinson. Introducing Icons . Brisbane: Nazareth Publications, 1991.

Hoorn, J. Strange Fruit: Testimony and Memory in Julie Dowling's Portraits. The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 2007.

Matthews, E. Twentieth Century French Philosophy . Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1996.