We Were Paradise
2019
We Were Paradise is a body of work examining how women’s bodies and land are shaped, marketed, and consumed through shared systems of sexual, political, and colonial power.
I grew up in what was called “paradise”, a subtropical coastal region of south-east Queensland aggressively promoted from the 1950s onward as fantasy, escape, and promise. This narrative did not emerge accidentally. It was produced, legislated, advertised, and enforced.
My grandfather was a politician who helped promote this place as paradise. At the same time, my body was subject to the same logics of entitlement, extraction, and silence. What happened to my body was not separate from what happened to the land. The same systems that authorised ownership, access, and control operated at both scales.
When I left, I was living with anorexia, complex trauma, and addiction. Bodies were expected to adjust themselves to the demands of the place. Women’s bodies and land were treated as interchangeable resources. Beauty functioned as currency. Availability was rewarded. Refusal was erased.
We Were Paradise is a series of silk works built from traced outlines of hyper-sexualised internet pornography. These figures are placed back into the landscapes I have lived in and loved. They are there to insist on presence.
The use of cut-out bodies began much earlier, in After-No-Place, where absence could hold what I was not yet able to say. In We Were Paradise, these forms return in a different encounter, with the commodification of women's bodies and land made explicit.
The work holds the shared history of women’s bodies and Country being owned, modified, marketed, and stripped of agency. “Virgin land.” Terra nullius. Bodies made available. Places declared empty. These are not metaphors. They are operating principles that shaped law, culture, and daily life.
By situating these figures within specific environments, the work refuses that erasure. Bodies constructed for use are allowed to occupy place without apology. Landscapes are not passive backdrops. They are witnesses.
This work names a pattern that has been normalised, protected, and repeated.
We Were Paradise holds sexual violence and colonial violence as entangled forces shaping bodies, land, and ways of seeing.
Works from this project were included in the Incinerator Gallery, Social Justice Prize, in 2020, Melbourne, Australia, and the Herland, at the Women’s Library, Newtown, Sydney, Australia.
We Were Paradise (2020)
Original exhibition text, Incinerator Art Award: Art for Social Change, 2020
Artwork details
Karla PRINGLE, We were paradise, 2020.
Outlines of commodified bodies (porn) re-embodied in commodified landscapes (stolen land), sensorimotor site drawing, dredged coral concrete circa18C, snake skin, plant ink shroud, digital collage, printed on silk, hung from silky oak with sensory drawing.
Video documentation with sound.
Courtesy of the artist.
Original artist statement
“We were paradise, the land and I. We were capitalism’s insatiable appetite. I was a prepubescent beauty queen enmeshed in a backdrop of everlasting sunsets. I’d conjured lightning heating oceans with my sultry body. My dewy mouth gushed waterfalls over 'virgin' forests. This was the commodification of women and land. Virgins and terra nullius. My body was owned and used; the land, stolen and sold. I try to re/pair my relationship between my body and my environment. I use outlines of hyper-sexualised pornography re-embodied within stolen land. I’m coupling bodies with place, not as backdrops to entice consumption, but as embodied beings: connected ‘in Country’ through their relationships with living environments. I hope this contributes to change patriarchal and colonial disembodied destruction, and works to create a narrative for the engagement of sentient multi-species connection, reverence, inter-guidance and rapport.”
Original artist biography (2020)
Karla Pringle is a re/emerging artist living on Kabi Kabi land, Sunshine Coast, Qld. She investigates the re-embodiment of place, documenting her complex relationship and history with her environment. Her work questions ties between inherited violence, sexual abuse, disembodiment, and the unmentioned wars of colonialism, and tries to find a place of healing within it.
Exhibition record
Incinerator Art Award: Art for Social Change, 2020
Finalist, Incinerator Gallery, Moonee Ponds, Victoria.
We were Paradise
INCINERATOR ART AWARD 2020
Art for Social Change | 28 August – 1 November 2020 Following a dry river is record of a site specific installation of ‘We were paradise’, Incinerator Gallery, Art for social Change. Set on the boundary of Kabi Kabi, Jinibara and Wakka Wakka Country. A banner with outlines of commodified bodies (porn) re-embodied in commodified landscapes (stolen land), sensorimotor site drawing, dredged coral concrete circa 18C, snake skin, plant ink shroud, digital collage, printed on silk, hung on site.
In winter I followed a dry river, my hurting body, being with, through, burnt and cleared Country, past seeds waiting for rain, back home to paradise flooded. Where land rejuvenates quickly, hiding all the horrors done to it. I followed the dry river from behind the veil of green, to plantations and scorched Country and sang hits from my deranged childhood, fire songs from pop stars of the 80’s, Eternal Flame/ I'm on Fire, played them backwards and put them through fires, through water, over stars, in snakes bellies, and bodies of land and flesh, damaged, and still hiding damage. I tried to reverse of the spell of exploitation and hunger, that fire of harm that sits behind the curtain, that would not go out, even with floods.