Julie Gough

Psychoscape

Julie Gough positions her work The Promise II in dialogue with Tasmanian colonial works she has selected from the Gallery’s collection. Among the selected works is a sketch labelled ‘Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines 1816 Tasmania’ (1878), a copy of the pictograms on timber commissioned by Governor George Arthur (c.1830), which attempted to explain to Tasmania’s First Peoples the notion of equal justice under Vandemonian law. In Gough’s rendering, the Proclamation’s figures become a nursery room mobile that projects a shadow play of atrocity, representing the brutal frontier reality that exposed the fallacy of Arthur’s promise of justice.

Artist

Julie Gough
Trawlwoolway people, Tasmania