Look Who’s Calling The Kettle Black by acclaimed experimental artist r e a, tells the stories of Indigenous women and girls forced to work as cleaners, cooks, nannies and wet nurses in white households and institutions across Australia, from the colonial era to the mid-20th century.
“It’s a history of indentured labour,” says Flinders University academic Dr Ali Gumillya Baker, a Mirning woman from the Nullarbor, whose own Nana was put into domestic servitude when she was just six years old.
“It was forced domestic service, with no wages or wages seized by the state, as part of the nation’s assimilation policies designed to absorb Aboriginal people into the white population.”
Look Who’s Calling The Kettle Black reflects on the widespread exploitation of First Nation’s women and girls, and considers the impact this is still having today.
The series comprises 10 limited edition inkjet prints that feature archival photographs of Aboriginal women working as domestic servants alongside textbook definitions and racially profiled terms used to describe them.
Created 30 years ago, the series was the first body of work ever exhibited by r e a, who is from the Gamilaraay, Wailwan and Biripi Nations in New South Wales.
“r e a’s work is powerful, provocative and deeply moving,” says Dr Baker.
r e a, Iron from Look Who’s Calling The Kettle Black, 1992, dye sublimation print, 19 x 25 cm, On loan from the artist, © r e a
Flinders University Museum of Art now has the rare chance to obtain the very last available series and ensure one of Australia’s most prominent contemporary Indigenous artists is finally represented in the Museum’s collection.
If secured, Look Who’s Calling The Kettle Black will lead the conversation on this still-recent history of Indigenous domestic labour - which is often not taught in schools and has received very little exposure to date.
“Artworks like r e a’s are important because they facilitate really deep conversations about our shared history - their intergenerational impacts, how we understand healing, and ideas of reconciliation and decolonisation - and what they mean for the present,” explains Dr Baker.
“We can teach about these things really well by looking at this kind of artwork, because unlike a textbook which teaches through often dry language, art allows you to consider the emotional aspect of that history and what that means; it allows you to go quite deep, quite quickly, and gives students a more immediate access for forming their own understanding.”
Dr Baker teaches thousands of students at Flinders in this way every year. “We use the collection to invite students to create an intimate and personal relationship with the content, because artwork allows us to do that.”
She says this contributes not only to understanding ideas of race in relation to reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, but also in relation to ideas of race generally.
With new knowledge, Flinders graduates are then able go out into the community in roles such as teachers, socials workers and doctors, with greater understanding and empathy.
“The importance of teaching these histories impacts all of our communities.”
You can contribute to the courageous conversations driving reconciliation by donating to Flinders University Museum of Art.
Dr Ali Gumillya Baker speaking on artwork by Natalie Harkin, Archive-Fever-Paradox, 2013, ink on banana leaf paper. On loan from the artist, © the artist.
Artwork in the background: Leah King-Smith, Untitled #11 from the series Patterns of connection, 1991, direct positive colour photograph. The Vizard Foundation Art Collection of the 1990s, acquired 1994. On loan from the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne. Photo credit: Brianna Speight
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