Tandanya is proud to present
Belonging by Pamela Croft Warcon
9 May - 10 August 2008

Belonging is about reconciliation, and is a visual narrative of what Pamela Croft Warcon has learned about her life journey. Her work is also a personal healing tool which aids the understanding and acceptance of the events of her life while at the same time teaches her to love her physical, emotional and spiritual self.

Pamela Croft Warcon of the Uralarai People in South West Queensland utilises her creative talents to develop alternative story sites for her thoughts of identity and displacement, histories, sense of place and the effects of colonisation. Many of her works also reveal intimate stories about herself as a 'stolen' child and also refer to her own children and grandchildren who are descendants of such histories.  

The exhibition will feature a survey of works from Croft Warcon's career including The Sorry Wall: a major collaborative work produced with Croft Warcon's sister-cousin Cheryl Robinson. The installation tells a visual narrative about colonisation, extermination, domination, assimilation and integration using fifty birdcages containing found objects including bones, birds' wings, shells and discarded items. Each cage holds a story which forms a larger picture telling of the decay and destruction of the Australian landscape post-colonisation. The cages represent the barriers which where erected around Aboriginal ancestral lands by colonising settlers for claiming 'ownership' and the objects themselves; subliminal references to the histories and decimation of Aboriginal Australia.

Croft Warcon will also show a new series of monoprinted 'mud maps' produced especially for this exhibition. Produced on the banks of Pumpkin Creek, near her Keppel Sands home in Queensland, these prints map out connections to place and reveal intriguing sets of relationships between the physical, physiological, social, spiritual and metaphysical. With the different coloured clays of the muddy river banks as her printing block, Croft Warcon's maps also investigate concepts of identity and belonging by exploring and mapping the colonial, botanical and indigenous layers of memories within the landscape sites.