Rum Runners / Karla Dickens

LR 128

fonds

2018

Graphic Materials, Objects

9657840

6 bottles - ceramic in metal carrier, with textiles - 41 x 36 x 25 cm

Karla Dickens, b. 1967 is a Lismore-based artist with Wiradjuri heritage from the Riverina region of NSW. She trained at the National Art School in Darlinghurst and won the Bundjalung Art Award at Lismore Regional Gallery in 2006. Dickens work uses and repurposes recyled everyday items to explore themes of persistence, violence and misunderstanding in Australia's past and present.

This mixed media work 'Rum Runners' was a centrepiece in the opening section of the Eight Days in Kamay, an exhibition held at the State Library of New South Wales in 2020. The exhibition presented an Indigenous perspective on the key role imagery has played in constructing and reproducing dominant ideas and narratives of Cook and the Endeavour voyage.

Reference:
Design & Art Australia Online. 'Karla Dickens'. Accessed 24 January 2022 https://www.daao.org.au/bio/karla-dickens/biography/
The National. "Karla Dickens Lismore, NSW". Accessed 24 January 2022, https://www.the-national.com.au/artists/karla-dickens/fight-club/
Vickers, R. "Karla Dickens', Artist Profile 45, (2018): 68-75
Library correspondence file

This mixed media work comprises six ceramic bottles in a metal carrier assembled from found materials. The carrier is an iron-based metal wire bottle holder.

The bottles have collage and found materials attached. The collage is made up of drawings and prints on textile, representing non-Indigenous male figures from Australian history: James Cook, Charles Sturt, William Bligh, Abel Tasman, Matthew Flinders and Arthur Phillip.

The figures are drawn and coloured on a loosely woven textile. Skulls and bones are printed in black ink on tightly woven silver and black fabrics. Woven textile has been attached to the neck of each bottle.

Also included is an artists statement in the form of a poem titled 'Life-like Liquid'.

In copyright:
Copyright holder:: Karla Dickens
Please acknowledge:: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy Karla Dickens

Title from exhibition caption

Each bottle, dating from the early years of the colony and perhaps used to hold rum, has been repurposed to depict a white ‘founding figure’. Cook, for example, comes with a series of fish hooks, perhaps referencing the seafoods caught and taken at Kamay. Arthur Phillip with a strand of barbed wire, most likely a reference to his role in setting up the British penal colony. A number of the bottles show human remains such as skulls and bones, highlighting their complicity in deaths, particularly of Aboriginal people.

In her accompanying poem Life-like Liquid, Dickens delves deeper into these characters and the destruction they have caused to the lives of Aboriginal people. As she states, the epidemic of alcohol and its use by colonisers to rape, displace and kill Aboriginal people makes the delivery of these historical figures as booze bottles only too appropriate.

Reference:
Eight Days in Kamay, Captions for Room 1: Contested legacies. State Library of New South Wales. Accessed 24 January 2022, https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/eight-days-kamay/exhibition-text

Signed 'Karla/2018' in black marker pen