Fiona Foley Provocateur

Book excerpt: Dr Fiona Foley is an Aboriginal artist, Badtjala woman, and provocateur, part of a highly influential generation of urban Indigenous artists. Over a career now spanning thirty years she has consistently asked questions about the frontier wars waged against Aboriginal peoples and brought the "hidden histories" of the massacres and dispossession into galleries, public spaces, and a broader, society-wide debate. In recent years, her exposure of the familial threads that join her Aboriginal heritage to the family of white missionaries who came to K'gari/Fraser Island in 1897 emerges as a tour de force. Missionary Ernest Gribble was the brother of Fiona Foley's great great grandmother, Ethel Gribble, who married Fred Wondunna.Foley has had exhibitions all over the world. Retrospective exhibitions include "Fiona Foley: Veiled Paradise" at QUT Art Museum in 2021, "Who are these strangers and where are they going?" in Ballarat and Sydney in 2019-20, and "Fiona Foley: Forbidden" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane in 2009. Her work is in every major institutional collection in Australia, many private collections, and in public spaces, including the State Library of Queensland. At the heart of this book is friendship. It details Foley's meeting with art writer Louise Martin-Chew, the progression of their collegiate relationship, and traces the momentum of crucial years in Foley's art life until her most recent segue into academia. This book was shaped as a biography given the relevance of her life to the work that she makes, and the emotional and historical investment in the disruption and disenfranchisement of her Badtjala (and all Aboriginal) people as subject matter for her art.