Artists statement

‘Post Preston, After the Bushfires, Our Country, Plants and Animals Need Healing’, is Deanne Gilson’s response to Margaret Preston’s culturally appropriative works. With this painting, Deanne interrogates a complex field of inquiry regarding the objectified colonialist gaze, inappropriate commodification of cultural material and a reclaiming of lost knowledge.
This work also speaks to the complicated history of the Bundoora Homestead site and challenges historical truth narratives from the settler perspective and works as an excellent companion to her mother Marlene Gilson’s ‘The Life and Times of Bundoora Homestead’ artwork, commissioned for the Darebin Art Collection in 2018.

‘Post Preston, After the Bushfires, Our Country, Plants and Animals Need Healing’ was a winning work in the 2021 Koorie Art Show.

Artist Bio
Dr Deanne Gilson is a proud Wadawurrung woman and an award-winning visual artist living and creating from her ancestral home of Ballarat in Victoria. Her multidisciplinary art practice interrogates the colonial disruption of her family and explores ways in which contemporary art can create a platform towards healing, acceptance and reclaiming cultural identity, often drawing upon traditional knowledges of her ancestors.

The Victorian bush where Gilson grew up features predominantly in all of her paintings, alongside many Indigenous plants, trees and birds from her Creation Story. Gilson draws upon layers of tangible and intangible knowledge, she talks about the presence of the intangible as spiritual connections to Country and her ancestors, while the tangible knowledge reflects artefacts and other objects of daily Wadawurrung life. Her works portray a rich cultural history that continues to thrive and grow today despite the restrictions placed on her family by settlement.

Gilson’s practice defines Aboriginal women’s business past and present through contemporary art. Traditional marks alongside contemporary marks, link her to the practices of Indigenous mark-making, especially that on her body when in ceremony. Stating that “all of my artworks are an extension of my women’s business and draw on ochre sourced from Wadawurrung Dja (Country)”. The white is used in traditional ceremonies, while the charcoal is a direct link to Gilson’s matriarchal line of her mother’s business. Gilson’s mother, Marlene Gilson, also an artist, gathers charcoal from her daily fire, passing this onto her daughter, extending upon the old and the new ways of sharing knowledge and connection to Country.