Julie Dowling

Throughout her celebrated career, Badimaya artist Julie Dowling has drawn on a wide range of cultural and historical influences. However, portraiture, a genre that has not generally been embraced by contemporary Aboriginal artists, has been the central hallmark of her work.   Raised by a single mother on a meagre income, she attended a catholic convent school where she was exposed to images of saints at an early age. Her earliest icon-like images were strongly influenced by renaissance religious paintings. Later, while studying at Curtin University in Western Australia, her research led her to examine the events and consequences of Christianity’s early colonising role on her own, and other, Indigenous people.  This led her on a deeply personal artistic journey due, in particular, to the cultural implications and impact of her grandmother’s removal from her family as a member of the stolen generation, and her anger at the church and its sanctimonious attitude toward Badimaya people and their culture. Dowling’s grandmother had been forced to leave Coorow as the government dispossessed her of her land, and welfare officers tried take her children even though her white husband was still living with her.  She moved to the south-west to become anonymous within the Noongar community in which her older brother Frank lived. This forced removal and dislocation is the bedrock of Dowling’s oeuvre and motivation to paint. Her depiction of Aboriginal faces began as a way to help her family locate other likely family members as they encountered strangers on the street or on public transport. Many were part of the stolen generation - ‘lost’ due to their forced removal according to government policy at the time. She observed the features of each Noongar & Badimaya family and the way in which they differed from each other. This early focus is a ‘decolonising’ tool she continues to apply in her art to this day. Dowling, importantly, spends much of her time within her Badimaya community, amongst living relatives and family friends. She returns over and over to the life stories of her mother, grandmother and aunts. ‘I never start a painting without talking at some length to members of my family‘ Dowling says.  ‘I talk to my family because this is the first step in my connection to my community and my culture and my way of tapping into the inter-generational trauma due to dispossession & colonisation from which we are all healing to various degrees. ‘If I didn’t talk to them first then I couldn’t claim to call myself Badimaya at all.’ Dowling carries these influences towards a stark, often confrontational neo-realism but also partakes of the post-modern penchant for pastiche. Her surfaces are often a complex web of strong colours, contrasting textures and materials such as plastic beading, cloth and glitter. Fragments of the past make their presence felt in photo-like inserts or lines of text that reflect raw echoes of the spoken word. Traditional Aboriginal art motifs such as dot and circle patterning, or stylised allusions to rock or bark painting, contribute a traditional inflection to this complex overlay of meaning.  Dowling’s deft command of the principles of portraiture however, always elevates her subjects within this provocative visual synthesis. The halo, a common feature in her portraits, is used to impart the idea of the hero (as in Western art tradition). Dowling re-interprets this idea of heroism within Romantic & Renaissance portraiture as a way of reflecting back to the viewer the propaganda of colonial empire and entrenched colonial racism today. It is also a device she uses to focus in on ‘the self’ inherent in her portraits. Her intention is to concentrate on her subject’s inner lives rather than their surroundings.   In her cycle of seventy-five paintings titled Icon to a Stolen Child 1999, the viewer is transfixed before each haunting face, sensing the unfathomable depths of pathos, perhaps stopping to analyse the detailed background with its suggestions of causality, or silently acknowledging the reality of soul that makes each individual irreplaceable. These ‘Black Madonnas’ are not forlorn victims of white ignorance but resilient heroines who ultimately triumph. They become role models for future generations, icons to a spiritual connectedness that remains untrammelled.    Addressing the many issues First Nation sovereignty, autonomy & self-determination, Dowling seeks to pay tribute to the thousands of Aboriginal workers who have played vital, yet unacknowledged roles in rural communities. Love and empathy for her grandmother is apparent in works such as Mollie at Coorow Hotel 2001. In this powerful work referencing religious images of mother and child, we are shown the moment when the struggling laundress makes the difficult decision to leave her traditional country and find a better life for her family in the city. Mimi-like spirits in the background reflect her ancestors, silently wishing her to stay but the child peeping out from under her skirts suggests the tug of a more immediate reality and an insistent future.   In focusing so intently on the healing of past injustice, Dowling draws heavily on the ambivalent relationship between Aboriginality and Christianity. Catholicism in particular is seen to provide spiritual sustenance, as evoked in the sense of grace that imbues her characters, yet the memory of alienation and abuse eddy upon the painted surface, alerting us to a history that demands healing.   Julie Dowing has been an extraordinarily influential artist since she first exhibited her work in Perth in 1993. In 2000 she won the prestigious Mandorla Prize for Religious Art, and the following year was a finalist in the Archibald Prize, and won the People’s Choice in the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Award.  Though her artistic output is limited, she has participated in international art fairs, important curated shows and, prior to 2011, had more than eight solo exhibitions, with Brigita Braun of Artplace Gallery in Perth and Sullivan and Strumpf in Sydney. She severed her connection with Braun in 2011 and since that time has shown with Harvison Gallery in Perth, Bruce Heiser in Brisbane and Niagara Galleries in Melbourne. Dowling’s masterful and edifying paintings are held in major collections in Australia and around the world.