Georgia MacGuire from Ngardang Girri Kalat Mimini Art Collective
Ashe Davenport: When did your love for art begin and what has kept you connected to creating art?
Georgia MacGuire: My love for art has been with me for as long as I can remember. My mum was an artist. I grew up in a three bedroom commission house in Canberra with mum, my brothers, my Nan, my stepfather, multiple cousins and community; people coming in out of our house. Mum painted a mural in the hallway of the mountain ash forests that she grew up around, in Powelltown, Victoria. Not only did she paint the forest, there were all these little mythical creatures and spirits too. The focal point for that artwork was a tall, Black woman running naked through a creek in the middle of the forest. That's my first memory of a painting. It was an entire world. The mural was really about her connecting to Country and connecting to herself as well.
My older brother Matt loved art and drawing. He was so ridiculously talented that for years I had imposter syndrome. He could pick up a bloody HB pencil and create hyperrealism that would lift off the page. Unfortunately I lost him. Matt died at 30. And, you know he… took his talents and abilities and creative brain with him. Mum died quite young, too. I lost my youngest brother not long after that, who was also very creative and loved drawing. I feel like this is my torch to carry now.
You worked as a social worker for 20 years before you became a painter. What made you change careers?
Around 2009, I came out of a violent relationship and found myself quite a broken person. I couldn’t do social work. I needed to paint pretty pictures and just… re-engage in beauty. That’s when I got accepted into the Bachelor of Creative Arts through Deakin's Institute of Koorie Education. I did my phone interview from a psychiatric hospital, but that’s another story. Art has been a healing thing for me. I realised I could be an artist and still change the world. I could fill my soul and connect to Country and ancestors. These days, what keeps me connected to art more than anything else is the relationships I have with other creative Aboriginal women. In some ways, that's what this artwork is about.
The Queen Victoria Women’s Centre has received funding through the Victorian Women’s Public Art Program and Regional Arts Victoria to commission NGKM. What can you tell us about the work?
I'm working collaboratively with artists from Ngardang Girri Kalat Mimini. We’re creating a public monument, titled Creative Resilience, that recognises and celebrates the contributions of South Eastern Aboriginal women creatives. We’re specifically looking at makers, people like Aunty Aggie Edwards. She was one of many Aboriginal women across the state who contributed to their families and societies through making. She made eel traps and beautiful adornments and feather flowers. We’re creating a work that celebrates their skills, abilities and contributions and the fact that they did that through adversity.
Are you nervous about it?
Yeah, I am. On one level, I’m a perfectionist. I get nervous about everything I make. Also it’s an important work to get right. It needs to be inclusive and representative of Aboriginal women across the region. Even as a group, we can't represent every Aboriginal woman from every different language group, which is why it’s been important to us to have a cultural reference group. This work is going to be on Wurundjeri Country, and we want to do it respectfully and appropriately. I want it to pack a punch. I hope that it's the antithesis of a bronze sculpture of Captain Cook (laughs). I want to challenge this notion that women artists or even textile artists should be soft and gentle. We’re going to do it with every inch of our creative being. I’m excited to see how it evolves.
Why do you think it's so important that there is more permanent public art to examine the significant and diverse contributions of Victorian women?
Because it's 2022? When I was a teenager, there was so much discrimination, so many discrepancies. For me, it's not only important for women to be represented, but specifically for Aboriginal women to be represented, and artists. There has been monumental change, but those things that I experienced as a young woman: sexual discrimination, queer discrimination, racial vilification and discrimination, the divide between white privileged men and everybody else hasn’t changed. Over the last few years, things that I thought would get better have gotten worse.
The fastest growing population in prisons are Aboriginal women, and it's not because we're bigger criminals. It's because we live in a society where we're powerless. We're experiencing trauma and we're being disadvantaged. Women and particularly Black women should be recognised for their contributions. It's a bit like the whole Ginger Rogers thing: she did what Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards in high heels. We’re doing the same thing that men are doing, but we’re doing it while still not being able to walk around at night. We’re still more likely to be assaulted or murdered by a member of their family. We’re still not getting paid as much, and we’re often doing it while trying to raise children, and being judged for our appearances or our haircuts.
It's crucial for us to change the perception that women aren't contributing. It's also crucial that we highlight and be really, really clear: we’re still facing a lot of the things that the women who came before us are facing. Public artwork and monuments become part of the visual landscape of people's lives. They become part of the core sense of values and ideas. The more you put women in visible places and give them ownership over public spaces, the more it'll be welcomed and open and normalised.
What attracts you to using natural materials like paperbark in your work? Is it tricky to work with?
Natural materials are ultimately about that relationship with Country. Not only am I being provided for by Country, I'm also representing Country in paperbark. The thing I love about it as a material is that it’s a representation of the flesh of Country. It was widely used for so many different things: housing, clothing. My brother calls it nature's Alfoil because you can soak it and wrap your fish and cook in it. It was bandaging. It comes from Melaleuca, which is tea tree. It has natural antiseptic and healing qualities. It spoke to me.
It is really tricky to work with, particularly when I first started experimenting with it. It flakes, it's messy, it's fragile. It tears easily. A lot of Aboriginal people use natural fibres in their crafts: plants, feathers, bones and other materials from Country. You need to be really mindful of the conservation of the works and the potential risk of bringing Country into art galleries. They might contain live bugs and things that could go on to eat other people's artwork, which is not something I want to be responsible for.
The biggest challenge for me initially was that I had significant arachnophobia. Paperbark is the natural habitat of Huntsman spiders. In the early days, I’d pull a piece of paperbark off the tree and run screaming down the street because a bloody giant Huntsman had leapt out. Or one would end up in my car and I’d have a nervous breakdown crying because I couldn't get out of the car. Ultimately that led me to an exhibition I did later, which was all about spiders. I felt I needed to heal that relationship with them because they're part of Country.
Who are your biggest influences?
My matriarchs: mum and nan. Nan grew up in tiny little Powelltown, where the whole town knew she was Black. She was ridiculously intelligent, smart as a whip. My whole family got their sense of humour from her. She’d spend her last cent on other people. She fed half our neighbourhood on a regular basis. She was everybody's Nan. She always had a joke or a laugh, even when things were really, really horrible. The more I reflect on her as a person, the more inspired I am.
My mum influences me because she was one of those women who achieved against all odds. She was the first person in my family to get a university degree and one of the first Aboriginal people in Australia to become a qualified research librarian. She graduated with high distinction and won an award and did it with five children and all these other issues in her life. She wasn’t even five feet tall. She had the biggest heart.
Now I see these younger, incredible Aboriginal artists and performers and writers and activists who are speaking out in Naarm and on social media. They know their history and know their families. They know where they come from and they know their shit. They don’t muck about, and I really, really respect that.
The 2022 federal election saw record Indigenous representation in Australian Parliament. What changes do you hope to see?
I want to see the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody implemented. I want climate change and deforestation to be taken seriously. It's heartbreaking to me that out of all the countries in the world, we have the fastest extinction rates of native species. We also have one of the most unique collections of species. I want the focus to shift away from money and progress. I want the government to acknowledge that there's a lot of healing that needs to happen; that Country needs to be healed. We need to stop doing things that hurt Country. We also need to stop doing things that hurt each other, particularly women and particularly Aboriginal people and people of colour, people who identify as disabled and the queer community. It shouldn't be about money and how much something's going to cost. There's a lot that needs to change. We just need to stop fucking things up. And start fixing the things that we've already fucked.
Is it important to be hopeful? How does hope factor into truth telling?
That's a really hard question. If I wasn't hopeful that things could change, I wouldn't bother. I'd just give up. I think truth telling needs to happen, and hope is irrelevant. A lot of the more recent psychological therapies are about radical acceptance and mindfulness and being able to observe what's in front of you. But…. I think that’s the wrong question. At the moment… it’s very hard for Aboriginal people to have hope when so many of our kids are in Out-of-home care. And so many of us are still dealing with poverty and trauma. They talk about intergenerational trauma and the impact of the Stolen Generations, but we're still dealing with things that happen every day. I lost my mother and two of my brothers and my grandmother. We go from one experience of Sorry Business to the next. The truth needs to be told; not just about what’s happened, but what is still happening.
I've been screaming about this stuff since I was a child. I grew up in Canberra in the 1980s, surrounded by political activists. I'm now in my 40s and I'm exhausted. Maybe it's not so much the telling. It’s the listening that needs to happen for us to be hopeful. I've worked in non-Indigenous organisations and tried to explain to people why reconciliation is important and why Acknowledgment of Country is important, and that’s exhausting. The truth telling has been done. It's just that no one was listening, and no one acted on it. Until that happens, I don't think that there's going to be a lot of hope.
Who does your art belong to?
I want to say: anyone who wants it, but I guess you're asking me a more conceptual question. Sometimes I just make artwork for myself. Sometimes I make it for others. It’s about having a voice and sharing, and nobody can really own those things. I’ve been so fortunate to have songlines and knowledge shared with me, which show up in my art, but will always belong to our mob and communities. It’s a big spiritual question, but on a very practical level, I currently own a lot of my work. And you can own it, too. I’m an artist and my art is for sale. It’s how I make my living.
Interview: Ashe Davenport, Photos: Sandy Schelema