Audio Transcript
My name is Janice Peacock. My background is Meriam Mir language group, that’s of the Torres Strait Island Eastern Islands. We moved down to Brisbane when I was a baby so I was bought up in Redcliffe and Moreton Bay has pretty much become my home, you know, and living here most of my life has also been a big influence on what I create and the way I go about it and my perspective I suppose, as a First Nations person as well.
Art has always been a natural part of my life, you know like from an early age I’ve always been very creative. Creativity to me is an essential aspect of being human. The process of which I go about producing the work, usually instinctive responses to something that, you know, I want to talk about but I do it in visual way. As you can see all around me the artworks are, they’re actually headdresses. Headdresses were very much a part of traditional Torres Strait Island life.
These particular works, they were created as a response to a book that was written by an anthropologist called Cultural Cult Clan. I was quite horrified, he was saying that Indigenous Peoples all around the world needed to cross a big ditch to be able to enter the modern world or contribute to the modern world. So to me I thought, making a response to that in a visual way by creating artworks and putting them into a museum context would be a good way to do that. But it was also a playful and fun way to do that too, because it was a satirical response putting it into an everyday context and a contemporary context, a modern day context. I guess the significance is that it’s still relevant today.
These works were created in, between 2001 and 2003 and they’re still relevant today you know, so that I find, interesting, you know, well a bit sad really. The interesting thing is that because of the humour that’s associated with the work, it’s a bit of a spoof really, you know. You’ll get some people that will be walking away quite confused you know, I think, and then others that look at it and they might continue to and then start to laugh and catch what it’s about. But I love both aspects, some walking away confused because I think that it’s challenging for people. I like to challenge because it, you know, it’ll carry with them, they’ll take it away with them and think about it, maybe. And that I think, is what art is about really.