Australia: Mix it all up

Walmajarri artist John Prince Siddon spent his early years working on cattle stations as a stockman before a horse-riding accident led him to Mangkaja Arts, 400 kilometres east of Broome in the west Kimberley region of Western Australia. Unorthodox from the outset, Siddon works in two and three dimensions – from bullock skulls to boab nuts – to recount in vibrant colour and dynamic mark-making the lives of Aboriginal people. Siddon chronicles the generations of relocation and dispossession experienced by Aboriginal people, presenting these not as a linear narrative, but as a mind-altering mix of possibilities. This approach positions him as part of a lineage of Kimberley artists who have shared their powerful and often painful personal histories with outsiders. Siddon’s use of psychedelia, however, is his point of difference.

In Australia: Mix it all up, a colossal redback spider disguises itself as the Union Jack on the country’s west coast, a great white shark threatens attack on the eastern seaboard and a Tassie devil dominates the Apple Isle. Girt by native animals in a speckled sea, the landmass has become liquid and the aquatic has become terrestrial. Siddon is described by curator Emilia Galatis as ‘a man of many pasts, elusively literal, joyfully macabre and terribly concerned with the politics of our time’.

Lisa Slade, Assistant Director, Artistic Programs