Porcelaneous White Stoneware, Black Underglaze, Carving

From the week after the referendum I began a major body of text-based stoneware wall work as a response to the recent referendum in Australia (Oct 2023) asking to enshrine an Indigenous voice to parliament in the constitution, which was comprehensively voted down. The work was completed in January 2024.

The work is called IN Black & White and comprises 87 black and white stoneware hanging pieces with forms referencing boomerangs, shields, coolamons, colonial platters, plates. 

The work is heavily carved and came from a strong reaction of anger. The work has an immediacy to it and wasn’t pre-planned. As I produced the work, I shared images on social media, which generated a lot of conversations around people’s family histories and connections to the Australian colonial frontiers, and also opened up space for some to connect to and unpack their white privilege in a meaningful way. 

I am mixed heritage – Gamilaroi and colonial Irish, Scottish. 

The series speaks directly to ‘white settler colonial Australians’ whose descendants make up twenty percent of our population. 

The truth telling process in my opinion, is integral to black and white in Australia recovering from the legacies of, and ongoing genocidal and ecocidal occupation here.

Penny Evans, 2023