Artist:

Julie Gough

I am concerned with developing a visual language to question and re-evaluate the impact of the past on our present lives. Each work has been built from the outcomes of the last, and represents a claiming within a larger consideration of ways to personally invoke and involve nation, viewer and self in acknowledging our entangled histories.

Current artwork in installation, sound and video provides the means to explore ephemerality, absence and recurrence. One process is to revisit the past, literally revisit the places where particular events happened, to show through the resulting artworks that the time/space-place split is a modern invention.

Working with film enables me to utilise repetition and duration. Repetition of effects, perhaps action or text, offers a staccato tempo, something aligned to the trauma of multigenerational memories, a legacy of colonisation. Making these works allows me to experience Country, while revealing its tenacity, which parallels the survival of Tasmanian Aboriginal people against the odds. Duration similarly mirrors, in the gallery for the visitor, a temporal-witnessing of what I undertook outdoors, to gather and focus by filming, episodically, the evidence after the fact of invasion.

Photo: George Serras

Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway people)
Hunting Ground (Pastoral), Van Diemen's Land 2016
Purchased 2017 in recognition of the 50th Anniversary of the 1967 Referendum. Commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Search for works by this artist in the national collection.

Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway people)