Fiona Foley:
Veiled Paradise
25 June –
9 October 2022
McClelland presents influential Badtjala artist Fiona Foley’s first major solo exhibition, an important amplification of the voices and perspectives of Aboriginal people.
Fiona Foley: Veiled Paradise is on view from 25 June to 9 October 2022 and sees a significant cross-section of key works from Foley’s nearly forty-year career come together in a comprehensive exhibition.
Foley’s work is informed by her ancestral connection to K’gari/Fraser Island, drawing equally upon its serene beauty and the history of systemic violence and sexual exploitation perpetrated on its shores.
The exhibition is on tour from QUT Art Museum where it was shown in 2021.
Incorporating original research around the Government-regulated opium trade and of the connection between sex and violence on the frontier and beyond, the artist refutes colonisation’s attempts to erase her people and their histories.
Tirelessly, through painting, photography, film, sculpture and printmaking, Foley gives voice to the dispossessed. The exhibition explores themes of sex, violence, opium and land, in an expansive overview of artwork from the last few decades.
Foley’s practice, spanning over almost forty years—from the co-founding of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in Redfern in the mid-1980s, to now, has seen the artist flip the lens of ethnography in the restaging of history and events in her artwork.