We Were Paradise

2019-2020

I grew up in “paradise.” A small subtropical coastal region of south-east Queensland, marketed relentlessly from the 1950s as paradise and every fantasy adjacent to it. I returned recently. Thirty years later, the language had not shifted. Billboards and tourism campaigns still asked, Are you sexy enough for this place?

When I left, I had anorexia, CPTSD and a drug habit. I had tried very hard to be sexy enough for this place.

I learned early that women and land were entangled inside the same economy of desire, extraction and display. I was taught to perform beauty as currency. To become backdrop. To become terrain.

I had conjured lightning that heated oceans with my soft body.

My mouth spilled waterfalls through forests named virgin.

Cane fields burned beneath red heels.

I was capitalism’s appetite.

I was a ghost haunting the promised land.

We Were Paradise is a series of silk works that use outlines of hyper-sexualised internet pornography to re-embody the landscapes I have lived in and loved. These traced figures are returned to Country not as decorative overlays or consumable surfaces, but as complex, desiring, sensing beings in place.

The works refuse the separation between woman and land as parallel objects of consumption. They speak to the shared history of being owned, modified, marketed and stripped of agency. Virgins and terra nullius. Bodies made available. Country made vacant.

By situating these bodies within specific landscapes, I am not aestheticising harm. I am coupling body with place as a way to interrupt their shared erasure. These figures are not modified for sale. They are held in tension with the environments that were also taken, reshaped and sold. I am attempting to return power to the disembodied outlines of women constructed for use.

In celebrating corporeal inhabitation, sensuality and internal wildness, I seek to unghost both body and land.

This is not redemption.

It is reckoning.

A refusal to separate gendered violence from colonial violence.

A refusal to let either remain abstract.

Recognition

A work from We Were Paradise was selected as a finalist in the 2020 Incinerator Art Award for Social Change, one of Australia’s leading platforms for socially engaged contemporary art. The finalist work was exhibited at Incinerator Gallery as part of the national exhibition program.

Selected Works

Bracken Holding Drynaria (2019)

Digitally printed silk satin, hung from Silky Oak

Outlines of internet pornography re-embodied in place

Sensorimotor site drawing, plant ink, dredged coral concrete, snake skin, digital collage

Na’rawi Moves Wallum (2019)

Digitally printed silk satin, hung from Silky Oak

Outlines of internet pornography re-embodied in place

Sensorimotor site drawing, plant ink, dredged coral concrete, snake skin, digital collage

Ninderry and Cycadia (2019)

Digitally printed silk satin, hung from Silky Oak

Outlines of internet pornography re-embodied in place

Sensorimotor site drawing, plant ink, dredged coral concrete, snake skin, digital collage

Context

We Were Paradise examines the parallel commodification of women’s bodies and stolen land. It asks how desire is trained, marketed and extracted. It traces how both women and Country are rendered backdrop, surface and promise.

The works attempt a re-pairing between body and environment. Not restoration to innocence, but reconnection through accountability, sensation and presence.