Slot Projects

 

SLOT ON THE ROCKS

Placemaking N.S.W. has commissioned SLOT to present a series of five windows under the title – Curated Windows - in the window of 23 Nurses Walk, The Rocks / Tallowoladah.

December 2022 – April 2023

Window No. 2

GOMEROI ATTACKING MAJOR MITCHELL AND HIS NATIVE COMPANION 2014 - 2022

SUZY EVANS

As Surveyor-General of New South Wales, Thomas Livingstone Mitchell mapped his explorations of eastern Australia. In a style that reflects both Aboriginal forms of painting and western art, Suzy Evans represents Mitchell's encounter with her people, the Gomeroi, on their land in 1831. This meeting saw two of Mitchell’s party killed and forced him to return to Sydney.

January 11 – February 8

Suzy Evans

10 July - 13 August      Bengerang    

More on the artist

Suzy Evans is a descendant of the Gomeroi Nation through her maternal grandparents who lived at Bengerang a place near Moree to the north west of Sydney. She describes the dancing figures in her paintings as the representation of “the all of the Gomeroi people”. And her exhibition is SLOT’S belated offering to the celebration of NADOC WEEK, 2022, which we are proud to support.

Suzy is also a neighbour. She lives a few streets away in Waterloo. Coincidently her terraced house is part of a row identified as a heritage item by the City of Sydney Council in their recent rezoning of our area. Inadvertently they point to the fact that an Australia heritage is a faceted condition. Irrespective of our ancestry, indigenous, settler or migrant, in Australia we are part of our countries heritage, described in the Uluru Statement from the Heart of 2017 as stretching “from the creation, according to common law from ”time immemorial”, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.” Concurrently as Australians we are responsible for and to our heritage that stretches from the beginning to the present and into the future.

In 1967, perhaps belatedly the people of the Commonwealth of Australia voted at a referendum to include Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders in their settler society. Soon there will be a corresponding referendum prompted by the Uluru Statement from the Heart that is an invitation from the Indigenous people of Australia to join them in what will become our country.

We must accept this profound invitation. It has proposed a referendum that will recognise the indigenous people of Australia in the constitution and give voice to their heritage in parliament. It behoves us to ask, what does this mean?  And the point is that we don’t know what it means yet. The point is that we have to invent what it means and what it means as Suzy Evans might say - to become the all of the Australian people - to stand at the next beginning of our culture.

Tony Twigg

Suzy Evans

31 May - 27 June   Open

Link for more information on the Artist

Slot is proud to present Suzy Evans show Open. It coincides first with National Reconciliation Week and secondly with the re-opening of Sydney galleries following the Covid 19 lockdown.

Ruefully Suzy pointed out that the virus demonstrated one thing – how quickly our government could move, “with the stroke of a pen” as she put it, when the issue was survival. Aboriginal Australia hasn’t been so lucky. Now, while the past should never go without acknowledgement the future offers possibilities, of which reconciliation between the first and subsequent peoples of Australia is the most hopeful.

Suzy Evans is a neighbor. The Aboriginal Art Directory notes, “Suzy Evans is an artist working predominantly in painting, sculpture and printmaking. In addition to her work as a painter she produces a range of designer homewares and stationary under the name Modernmurri.” She was born at North Sydney in 1964 and lives mainly between Moree and Sydney. Another directory notes, “She was a finalist in the 2008 Telstra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards”. Her Heritage Country is Bengerang, NSW, Boomi Garah, NSW, Mungindi, NSW and her language group is Kamilaroi. “Suzy Evans artwork, Night Skies was translated onto banners and light boxes throughout the Sydney during NAIDOC week” and her “inspiration for this painting came from a story told to her by Aunty Rose Fernando from Lightening Ridge. The story goes that the stars in the night sky, known as ‘twinkling stars’ to non-Aboriginal people are known as ‘Laughing Stars’ by Aboriginal people.”

Is it too cheezy to observe that we all live under the same sky? Perhaps. And turning to Suzy’s exquisitely collaged feathers, what is about them that seems precisely Australian? Is it their colour? Perhaps it’s the isolation of the feathers that Suzy describes as a whirling dancers? Or a connection these works on paper seem to make with the bark paintings of northern Australia? Perhaps they hint at a shared heritage, understood more as an emotion than as a narrative, something shared in a way that nationalism isn’t. That would be a reconciliation and one of our societies great achievements.


Tony Twigg