Brenda Croft
“This body of work, comprising digitally manipulated images, text and soundscape, has been developed over the past three years, conceived during the artist’s residency at the Australia Council Greene Street Studio in New York, and created in Perth and Sydney. The sense of travel informs much of the work; hard to locate, links to place, strands of time. Diluted by the filter of popular/populist/revisionist story-telling. The making of new, invidious (urban) myths.
Drawing on corrupted versions of sanitised – pounded by whitewash – stories. Tall tales, with little connection to truth, unravelled, overlaid, inverted. Something foreign, yet familiar, depending on where you place yourself.
Do you know where you are? On whose land you stand, whether here or when you travel over vast distances? Or whose bones were ground underfoot into fertilising stolen spoils? Do you know where you are from? Going to? Been?
Aboriginal land, always was, always will be.”
(Brenda Croft 2000, excerpt from Fever)
“These images are drawn from the deep well of my father’s life, the part of it unfamiliar to me as his eldest child and only daughter. Seven years ago I assumed the task of packing up the material remains of his life, seventy years or so on this earth…So I carried these images around in my mind for the next seven years, returning to them often, and wondering about the city- and country-scapes, the period in which they were set and the anonymous people in them, apart from my father. He did not know his family and in his single years travelled extensively along the eastern seaboard, I feel that there is no-one from that part of my father’s life to ask the questions that I have carried with me, along with the images."
(Brenda Croft 2003, on Man About Town)
