Joan Ross: Have we got everything

In Have we got everything, Joan Ross paints this world undone and asks the pertinent question, is having ‘all the trappings’ still revered or has our settler culture relaxed its privileged sense of entitlement? Have we finally stopped collecting the things uncollectable? Or will our colonial efforts to possess Australia just go on ad infinitum. This superiority is still alive and well, sometimes blatant but always in our subconscious, playing its hand silently. People rarely give up positions of power easily and often don’t realise just how privileged they are to function from it.

Trays of collected butterflies held against stolen empty landscapes, where everything has been taken, used, chopped and collected to make more money to buy more land, to buy more handbags and luxuries, leaving little.

Birds with no heads yell as a warning, couples regally dressed try to revive birds and insects by hugging or stitching their heads back on whilst wearing extinct bird’s feathers in their hat’s or necklaces of their images or wings. Joan turns the tables here, giving an alternative view, letting the colonials show regret, for the greed, for thinking that it was okay to pillage without any consideration for the original occupants or nature or for our futures.

Joseph Banks did not ‘discover’ a 100million year old flower

Dead butterflies scatter like regrets. Trees lie felled, their stumps echoing with silence. Birds flap blindly, stitched and scarred, their song a futile whisper: what a wonderful world. This isn’t Joan Ross’ world, but a reminder of the one in which we live. The cumulative effects of human activity on the natural world–land as a site of destruction both colonial and climatic–Ross’ new vibrant series of paintings, works on paper, and a new animation commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, remind us just how unhomely the homely trappings are. 

Monumentalised vases chock full Colonial head flowers in vases, is there anywhere they haven’t taken (over). These ghost-like flower-faces from Australia’s past (and present), haunt Ross’ iconically incisive explorations of Australia’s colonial legacy, reminding us to remember what we can’t always see.

Marking a new direction with her signature use of fluorescent yellow –in Heads and Tails we see hi vis reenvisioned as a way to absorb what used to signify ‘safety’ and ‘seeability’ in the outside world, now used as a device to disappear into our psyche as a natural occurrence in our inside worlds; pitting human and nonhuman connections alongside each other as another reminder that colony is everywhere, even our homes.

Winner of the 2017 Sulman Prize at the AGNSW and a three-time Archibald finalist, Joan's work is held in countless major public collections. Most recently Joan's work was presnted in a major survey exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery,  Canberra. 

view past Joan Ross exhibitions