Karla Dickens

Born in Sydney in 1967, Karla Dickens is a Wiradjuri artist living and working in Lismore, New South Wales. Despite training as a painter at the National Art School, Sydney, in the early 1990s, Dickens quickly turned to collage and sculptural assemblage. Dickens is also a skilled writer, often using poetry and prose to amplify the themes of her mixed-media collages and sculptures, spanning the intersections of race, class and gender; motherhood; Australian culture and politics; and the ways in which the past informs the present.

Collage is essential to Dickens’ practice. Across Western art history, collage has reared its head as a politicised medium. During the First World War, European Dada artists used collage to reflect a world in turmoil. They positioned themselves as anti-war, they rejected the class system and so their art – collage, poetry, performance – was frequently non-linear, humorous and even nonsensical. Dada artists used collage to scramble the existing meanings of images, to combine multiple artforms at once and to draw from material close at hand, such as newspapers, political posters and other print media. During the 1950s and 60s, collage again carried political messages as a part of the Pop Art movement. Similar to Dada, collage was a medium for Pop artists to use what was close at hand and thus to critique the world around them. This time imagery from glossy magazines, advertising campaigns and slogans, newspaper clippings and factory-produced domestic products called into question burgeoning American ideals of capitalism and consumerism, gender roles within broader society as well as the structure of the nuclear family.

For Dickens, the technique (collage) evolved out of necessity; “…because I had little money, I’d find things to collage”. However, she has since transformed the process of scavenging materials from op-shops, historical refuse and hard rubbish from the Lismore tip into salient political commentary. Through the process of collecting and reworking materials into new forms, Dickens reveals our underlying associations. Innocent enough kangaroos, Australian flags, bullseyes, cowboys, clowns, innocuous plastic toy snakes, wooden toy guns and dress-up props quickly turn grim and reveals a mêlée of damming political attitudes towards Aboriginal people. By using the close at hand and revising the existing meaning of images and objects, collage has enabled Dickens to illuminate and resist disturbing historical and contemporary narratives surrounding the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia.

A Dickensian Country Show (2020)

Upon stepping into A Dickensian Country Show, you enter a world of clowns, freaks, outcasts, misfits and mystics. Dickens has repurposed the trappings of regional country fairs and Easter shows to illuminate a shadow-side to Australian society.

The topsy-turvy sideshow is brimming with found objects, photographs, mixed-media collages and sculptures, as well as hand-painted signs and printed banners. A Dickensian Country Show includes works that riff on the thrills of simulated risk, such as Truth on the ghost train (2019) or A rough ride (2019). In Ready, aim, fire (2019) and Black Joe’s (2019) Dickens reworks bullseyes and targets to enact violence as entertainment. Lions, Tigers and Endangered Bears (2019) make use of a central tenet of the sideshow – the spectacle of difference – to produce piercing political commentary on the historic and ongoing treatment of Aboriginal people. In A Dickensian Country Show (Artist’s Statement) (2019), Dickens describes these perverse pleasures of the sideshow. She writes, audiences are “…waiting for the acrobat to lose her footing / the fat man to explode / they feel beautiful as they cringe at the bearded lady / the snake-man and any other human with unusual differences.

Amongst her mixed-media collages and assemblages, Dickens has also included found objects. The collection and curation of second-hand circus paraphernalia, scoured from an auction house in Adelaide, expands upon Dickens’ collaging technique. Once again, Dickens reflects the world around her, revealing objects in a new light beyond their normal use or purpose. By thrusting real-world items that capture prejudiced cultural attitudes into motion with her own works, Dickens produces a maelstrom of haunted objects.