Why pay attention?
In under a decade, Garrwa/Yanyuwa artist Miriam Charlie has emerged as a powerful
voice in contemporary Australian photography, receiving much attention for her 2015
politically inflected series My Country No Home, focusing on housing issues in her
home of Borroloola, with works acquired by Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria and
featured in a solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in 2020.
What does she do?
Charlie creates a sense of immediacy and intimacy with polaroid photographs, often adding handwritten descriptors of the scenes.
What's going on?
In Charlie's photographic works we see sensitive, unflinching portrayals of everyday life in Borroloola. She attempts to gain the attention of government leaders, demanding more for her community.
The artist says…
"When you live in a remote area, and some people live in the city, they don't know anything about our life, or know how we live. So they can see how we live in the bush - it's very hard, kids have to find their own playground, they gotta find their own things to do, so they go fishing with their family, and they learn how to fish. My next exhibition is about how we still hunt, collect our bush tucker, cook it in our traditional ways, I wanna capture all that - we still have it in our system, in our body, in our bloodlines, we still have that."
See it at...
Miriam Charlie's polaroid series, The Promise of Housing, will show at the Tin Sheds Gallery at The University of Sydney, from 7 April to 14 May. A new solo show at N. Smith Gallery, Sydney, will run from 13 to 30 July, focusing on new works capturing local kids learning how to live, hunt, and gather food on Country.
