Transforming histories: the visual disclosure of contentious pasts

Abstract

The thesis and exegesis examines the potential of visual art to provide fresh forms of engagement with historical story than the archived and the written. The place of memory, forgetting, absence in Australian history, in particular in Indigenous and non Indigenous encounter are investigated. Place, object, story determined from original sources are materially reunited as an opportunity for public re-engagement with the past. This re-negotiation is intended to suggest visually, through alternative dimensions and senses than generally offered with otherwise subsumed texts, the significant resonance and the impact of the past on our national present.