Coming from an Australian Indigenous heritage that spans thousands of generations, Australian First Nations artist Mandy Quadrio will present a discussion about how she uses her art practice as a vehicle through which to express her activism, her Aboriginality and her enduring cultural continuum. As part of the Tasmanian Aboriginal diaspora her work responds to genocidal practices and dispersals in Tasmania and in particular the ongoing universal and Australian colonial myth that she and her people are extinct.
She will speak to specific exemplars of her work that seek to counter this ongoing myth and will further discuss how her practice provides her with a framework from which to demand full disclosure of the true history of Australia’s colonisation, where hidden, erased and denied histories of Australia’s Indigenous people are acknowledged and made visible. While her work often seeks to bring attention to negative, oppressive outcomes of colonisation, she actively celebrates her ongoing Palawa existence.
Biography
Mandy Quadrio is a First Nations, Tasmanian Aboriginal, woman who lives in Brisbane, Australia. She was born in 1959 in Melbourne, Australia.
She proudly claims her Trawlwoolway and Laremairremener heritage, through her maternal, ancestral Countries of Tebrakunna, Coastal Plains Nation, north-east Tasmania and the Oyster Bay Nation of eastern Tasmania. Tasmanian Aboriginal people are collectively known as Palawa. She is also of European descent.
As a Brisbane-based artist she investigates the complexities of Aboriginal identity through researching cultural objects such as bull kelp, sea grasses and ochres in relation to their cultural, historic and aesthetic uses. These objects converse with industrially-manufactured, abrasive steel wool, one of her signature materials, which acts as a powerful metaphor for the attempted erasure of her family, her language and her nation. Countering ongoing myths of Palawa extinction, her research comes from the perspective of uncovering the hidden, the absolute voids and the denied in Tasmanian history. This research manifested in her Doctor of Visual Arts titled: "Asserting Palawa presence beyond dispersals, voids and spaces" completed in 2021. Her work functions as a refusal to be rendered invisible as she asserts her Palawa cultural continuum.
