Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: The Ways that First Nations Women in Art & Community Speak Blak to the Colony & Patriarchy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of ‘artistic terra nullius’ refers to the violent erasure of First Nations peoples in colony Australia and highlights their absence – particularly Aboriginal Women – in the white-dominated arts world. This doctoral research by creative project and exegesis sets out to document and respond to the work of Aboriginal women in art and community. I have used practice-led inquiry as the main methodology, informed by my own roles as artist, writer, curator, community researcher and as a Wemba-Wemba & Gunditjmara, matriarchal and sovereign woman. Practising community ways of 'being, knowing and doing' to witness, participate and respond to Aboriginal women's art making and activism, I developed a new body of visual works and a series of essays, together with an exegesis relating to the project as a whole. The exhibition in December 2019 at Footscray Community Arts Centre held two bodies of work in two spaces. The ontological (or Being) space was a healing space of unconditional love, one of memory, timelessness, and respite. It has been created as 'daily acts of repair' in collaboration with other Aboriginal women and family members in a new process of bush dyeing fabrics, clothing and rags to become 'healing cloths”, dyed with gathered gum leaves, bush flowers, plants and Wemba-Wemba family bush medicine gifted to me from my Aunties. As a three-dimensional space, it makes visible trauma trails and stains and visualises what respite and healing could look and feel like. Under the 1961 flickering Super-8 image of my great-grandmother, this space also recreates ‘home’, particularly resonating with Aboriginal women’s curation of ‘home’ even in Mission housing. The second space, an epistemological (or Knowing) space, was an active studio of photographic based works drawn from matriarchal family stories, both past, present and future, and archival research. It included scholarly and other literature on Blak art and representation, in a recreation of my home studio and office. These bodies of work were made over a four-year project, drawing on concepts of de-colonising, Aboriginal feminist standpoint theory (Moreton- Robinson) and sovereignty. In emphasising making art as both research and artistic outcomes, I demonstrate art as a sovereign act, based in cultural practice and sovereign values. Both the exhibition spaces and the exegesis weave across past, present and future, across research in family, community and the Aboriginal women’s arts-work, across multiple creative media and stories – in the process here called ‘Ghost Weaving’. Responding to various modes of oppression, patriarchy and racism, Blak women’s art is not only a form of resistance to colonising, to violence, to academia and the white art world. It is also an ethical foregrounding of other forms of knowing and being. The exegesis is in two main parts: the written, thesis-element and a series of appendices which include a pictorial record of the exhibition, links and lists of related works, including relevant essays.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".