Fiona Foley is a Brisbane-based artist and exhibits regularly in Australia and internationally. She has recently held solo exhibitions at Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne.

In 2009-10, the University of Queensland Art Museum and Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art co-curated a survey exhibition of Fiona Foley’s work, titled Forbidden. The exhibition traversed photography, sculpture, moving image, etching and installations.

During 2011 Foley was appointed an Adjunct Professor with the University of Queensland. Her essay, ‘When the Circus Came to Town’ was published in the November issue of Art Monthly.

Foley’s major public sculptures include: The Edge of Trees, Museum of Sydney, Sydney (1995); The Lie of the Land, Melbourne Museum, Melbourne (1997); Tribute to A’vang, Parliament House, Canberra (2001);Winged Harvest, The Australian National University, Canberra (2001); Witnessing to Silence, Brisbane Magistrates Court, Brisbane (2004); Bible and Bullets, Redfern Park, Sydney (2008); Black Opium, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane (2009); Sugar Cubes, Mackay Regional Council, Mackay (2009).  (Source: MCA)

Fiona Foley was born in Maryborough, Queensland, in 1964 and grew up in Hervey Bay and Sydney. Foley obtained a Certificate of Arts at East Sydney Technical College in 1983. In 1986 she received a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Sydney College of the Arts, and 1987 a Diploma of Education at the University of Sydney. In 1987 she co-founded the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative in Sydney, along with fellow urban-based artists Avril Quaill, Michael Riley, Tracey Moffatt, Fernanda Martins, Jeffery Samuels and Raymond Meeks. She is currently Adjunct Professor at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane. Foley has an exhibition history of over twenty years. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Australia and overseas. During 2004 Fiona undertook international exhibitions and residencies in New York and Ireland. In 2005 she was invited to create a new work for the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, United Kingdom. In 2006 Foley held a solo exhibition at October Gallery, London, entitled Strange Fruit. She was also invited to participate in Global Feminisms, the inaugural exhibition at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Centre for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2007. Her commissioned public art can be found in major cultural sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane. She is represented in a number of public and private collections nationally and internationally. (Source)

Read more about Fiona Foley here.

Edge of the Trees

by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley

"Edge of the Trees is about contact. It acknowledes the indigenous place and people of Sydney, home of the Eora, and the many layers of occupation since 1788. Materials - stone, wood, steel - represent interface of natural and built environment. Substances - shell, hair, ochre, ash, bone - represent human presence and passing. Names - of Eora men and women, First Fleeters, plants and Koori callings of place - represent shared and separate custom, memory and knowledge. A place to enter, explore, contest anew; perhaps reconciliation?"

Museum of Sydney Forecourt

Witnessing to Silence

2004

by Fiona Foley

Bronze, Water Feature, Pavement Stone, Laminated Ash and Stainless Steel.

Curator Fiona Foley's artwork relates to the land and includes Australian botanical and historical references. Her work explores dialogues between past and present in Australian cultural expression. Witnessing to Silence focuses on the external forces of nature, change and regeneration. It reminds us that nature is a dominant force that can govern peoples' lives. The columns of ash and place-names refer to the extremes of fire and flood experienced in the Australian bush. The misting sacred lotus lilies symbolise enlightenment and provide a space for contemplation and regeneration.

The place names are the names of the towns and stations where massacres have occurred in Queensland. The ash and the water are symbolic of how the massacred bodies were disposed of. Listen to Fiona Foley speak about this work in an interview here.

The recurring references to opium in her recent work are also unexpected, unless the viewer is aware of the Queensland Government’s rather dubious dealings with this substance a century ago. Aboriginal people who had become addicted to opium were imprisoned on Palm Island, while the government-controlled sale of the drug produced a healthy revenue. Foley’s 2006 public art work Black opium in the atrium of the Queensland State Library is one of her memorials to unacknowledged details of our past. (Read the entire article here.)

I DON’T SEE MYSELF NECESSARILY AS A POLITICAL ARTIST. I’VE WORKED WITH DIFFERENT THEMES AT DIFFERENT TIMES IN MY LIFE…WHAT I LIKE TO DO IS READ AND UNEARTH ASPECTS OF HISTORY. I AM INTRIGUED ABOUT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND WHAT ATTITUDES WHITE AUSTRALIANS HELD TOWARDS ABORIGINAL PEOPLE. 

Black Opium was commissioned as part of the State Library's 2006 redevelopment and was designed to draw visitors along the Knowledge Walk and to act as a prelude to the Heritage Collections Suite on level 4.

Suspended poppy heads arranged in the shape of the infinity symbol connect to a series of seven small rooms representing different ambiances and cultures, exploring themes of history, memory and politics through sculptural installations and photographs.

Foley's artistic concept was inspired by the book, The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs - The Untold Story(1997) by Rosalind Kidd, and the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897. Foley, an Adjunct Professor with the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University said "This piece of legislation passed in 1897 and the subsequent amendments in 1901 affected so many Chinese and Aboriginal people's lives in Queensland. The story that unfolds through the reading rooms and Black Opium sculpture is a hint of this history". 

The Queensland Government of the time commissioned Archibald Meston to look at the problems affecting the health of Aboriginal people, resulting in the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897. Foley was intrigued to find the words "aboriginals and opium" together in the wording of an act of parliament, leading her to further investigate the story behind it. The act allowed Aborigines to be "forceably removed" to missions, quarantined from townsfolk which some considered the heartbreaking sight of Aboriginal people afflicted by opium addiction an "eyesore". Missions like Palm Island and Yarrabah were set up under this new practice of social experimentation and racial eugenics. "This history is not taught in schools."

Foley says her work gives Queenslanders an opportunity to confront and understand parts of their history.

In the process of creating this public artwork Fiona Foley researched Aboriginal and Chinese related collections in the John Oxley Library. A tag has been created on our One Search catalogue that brings together many of the photographs and documents incorporated intoBlack Opium.

Foley's visually seductive work leads visitors on a journey through a little known part of the state's history. Her work is layered with meaning, revealing a time when Aboriginal people were often paid for their labours with opium, robbing them of their health, and in some cases, their lives. (Source: State Library of Queensland)

“... And finally, what about the magical number seven? What about the seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven daughters of Atlas in the Pleiades, the seven ages of man, the seven levels of hell, the seven primary colors, the seven notes of the musical scale, and the seven days of the week? What about the seven-point rating scale, the seven categories for absolute judgment, the seven objects in the span of attention, and the seven digits in the span of immediate memory? For the present I propose to withhold judgment. Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all these sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it. But I suspect that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence.” Read more in "Fiona Foley and her fearful symmetry" by Alison Kubler

While Foley’s work crosses several media, her photographic work takes as a starting point, the idea that the camera never lies.  However from Foley’s perspective those who wield cameras in such a way have told many a fabrication about Indigenous peoples and peoples of color.  Realism is not the same as reality.  Foley’s work charts very difficult territories and No Shades of White is no exception.  It is difficult not because of its content but because of its relationship to reality.

Through the veneer of classic anthropological style portraits, her series of HHH (Hedonistic Honky Haters) photographs is difficult because it has a direct reference to the photographic glorification of the Ku Klux Klan as a theatre of hatred.  We do not so much respond to those photographs as we do to our knowledge Hedonistic Honky Haters are not so much the mirror image of the Ku Klux Klan but an inflection—a kind of ‘Right back at you, brother’.  You can see it might be humorous but the laugh knots in your throat.

As viewers, we don’t know what is or isn’t true. Does the HHH really exist?  Foley confirms that the HHH was founded in 1965 as a secret society and that although the movement was once a thriving national body with an extensive membership, it is now not active.  Their activities were held at clandestine places throughout the United States and included ceremonies involving public gatherings, ritualistic practices and Christian paraphernalia.  HHH members are highly visible and known for their black hoods and colorful cloaks.  When in New York as an artist-in-residence, Foley found seven HHH members who became the subject for this photographic series. (Read the whole article here.)

This exhibition presented a survey of Foley’s art from 1994 to 2009 and included key works across photography, sculpture and installation, printmaking and video. Descended from the Badtjala people of Thoorgine or K’gari (Fraser Island) and based in Brisbane, Foley explores a range of concerns through her practice including colonial race relations, sexuality and the experiences of Queensland’s Aboriginal populations at the turn of the twentieth century. Through her art Foley mines forgotten or hidden histories, bringing them to light as a means to assess our present in relation to the past.

Foley’s works consider the pervasiveness of power relationships and inequalities in Australia, from her careful re-staging of colonial photography to her recent investigation of the history of opium in Queensland and the ‘Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act’ of 1897. She says, ‘My work is talking about the racial tension that’s here in this country and is never fully articulated — it’s always under the surface.’ Foley cloaks her politics within symbols and scenarios that are all the more powerful for their restraint. The installation Land Deal is simply comprised of the items that John Batman gave to the Wurundjeri people in 1835 in exchange for the land where the city of Melbourne now stands.

Despite the complexity of her subject matter, there is a sense of playfulness and humour to some of Foley’s works, from the racial inversion evident in herHHH photographic series (depicting Hedonistic Honky Haters), to the contemporary touches that disrupt her pseudo-colonial imagery or her playful recreation of racial conflict on Cronulla Beach. Foley’s photographs often involve a performative element and she frequently places herself within the pictorial frame. Side-stepping stereotypes, her works resonate for the first nation peoples of other lands and to those who are categorised as ‘other’ in this country today.

Foley’s art has been exhibited extensively in Australia and abroad. As well as her gallery works, she has created a number of public art commissions in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. Fiona Foley: Forbiddenrepresented her most comprehensive solo exhibition to date. It was presented in partnership with The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane from the 19th February – 2nd May 2010.

This exhibition presented key works from the last fifteen years of Fiona Foley’s practice, including Native Blood and Badtjala Woman (1994); Land Deal(1995); Black Velvet (1996); Wild Times Call (2001) and the photographic series Signpost (2005) and HHH (2007). Foley’s film work, Bliss (2008) recently acquired for the MCA Collection, was also featured in the exhibition. (Source: Museum of Contemporary Art)

Fiona Foley: Forbidden features photographs, sculpture and installation, printmaking and video encompassing 1994 to the present. Exhibited works explore a broad range of themes that relate to politics, language, female sexuality, race and the history of opium in Queensland. Her images are born out of the experiences of Indigenous people in Australia, yet they resonate for the first peoples of other lands, and to those who are categorised as ‘other’ here in this country. (Read the media release here.)