Mother Country #1 2019

Summary

'Mother Country #1' was displayed in megan evan's 2023 City Gallery exhibition, Colonial Confusion. The flag is part of an ongoing body of work by artist megan evans titled, the KELOID Project, through which she examines the traces of early colonial history and the impact of that history as it unfolds today. Of Scottish, Irish and Welsh heritage and born on Wurundjerri land, evans looks at the role of the coloniser and its impact from the perspective of a descendant of a settler/colonial family.

She draws on objects from the Victorian era, her great grandmother Isabella’s era; objects with a particular aesthetic, often highly polished and finely crafted. evans has come to regard these objects as bearing witness to the dispossession of First Nations peoples. Each object has been disrupted and transformed by the artist into those that contain violence and acts of oppression while still remaining aesthetically beautiful. Through this act the object bears the scars of history.

The Union Jack is a potent symbol of British imperialism and the intervention on this work speaks to the absurd and unstable claim non-Indigenous Australians have on the land and the denial of First Nations history. The artist asserts it is a claim built on white colonial ideals, the unsustainable legacy of which can be seen in the lack of a treaty with First Nations people of today. While evans has inherited this legacy with the rest of contemporary Australia, her work poses the question, how long do we accept this as the status quo?