"What I like to do is read and unearth aspects of history, particularly Queensland’s colonial history"…
Fiona Foley, 2009[i]

If Fiona Foley: Forbidden, the first major survey exhibition of Fiona Foley’s artistic practice held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney earlier this year, is anything to go by, it is impossible to separate Foley’s artwork from the politics and struggles which have marked indigenous and non-indigenous power relations in Australia from colonisation to the present. As a Badtjala woman from the Hervey Bay region in Queensland – a region that encompasses Thoorgine or K’gari (Fraser Island) – Foley has been forthright in challenging and disrupting a ‘European vision’ of indigenous peoples and the Australian landscape, a vision which abets colonialism/imperialism by alienating the land from its native occupants and inscribing it in European terms.[ii]

Foley’s re-presentation of her culture together with the attention that she draws to the sins enacted against her people in her artwork is at once evocative and confronting.
For while much of her imagery evolves from the stories, experiences and presence of her Badtjala kin and ancestors, and the indigenous community in general, her work also has moral implications for the Australian audience. That is, do we live in a society founded upon the worthy enterprise of transplanting a civilisation, or one founded upon the usurpation, colonisation and destruction of a culture? For example, one of the more confronting works displayed in Forbidden, Stud Gins (2003), was an installation of blankets positioned horizontally on a wall with the bold text ‘shared’, ‘ravished’, ‘defiled’ and ‘discarded’.
Foley refers here to the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women on the frontier by white settlers. However, as curator Rachel Kent points out, the blankets themselves have numerous connotations when viewed through the lens of Australian history. Kent claims that they can be seen ‘both as items of exchange and as objects containing foreign disease, passed on to Aboriginal people with no natural immunity, who were decimated as a result.’[iii]

Yet while Foley does not shy away from contested questions which lie at the basis of Australian identity and subjectivity, it would be folly to interpret her work as overtly political. In fact, rather than being placed in the straightjacket of a political artist, Foley prefers to see herself as an ‘educator’, as somebody who, through her art, tries to ‘read and unearth aspects of history’ and thus transmit cultural knowledge to the younger generation.
A huge amount of research underpins all of Foley’s work and in addition to her prolific art production, including paintings, public sculptures, prints, photographs, installations, video and curatorial experience, she has been a committed teacher (she retains the position of Adjunct Professor at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.)
She has also been an active public speaker, writer and editor, and a member of many indigenous and non-indigenous art organisations. She was one of the founding members of the two artist collectives which were and continue to be significant in ensuring that agency is given to the artistic production of indigenous peoples of Australia: ‘Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-Operative’ founded in Sydney in 1987 and ‘proppaNOW’ artist collective founded in Brisbane in 2004.