Press Release: a place for our bones
a place for our bones is a collection of stories…
Grandmother’s Bones are symbols of the life of the artist’s great great grandmother, daughter of an Aboriginal domestic servant and Irish wharf-worker, born in the former Plymouth Inn on Cumberland Street in Sydney’s the Rocks in 1878. The site has since been the subject of extensive archaeological investigation with thousands of artefacts discovered and now housed within the Discovery Museum.
The artefacts found in the earth of Tallawoledah have been elegised in paint, as Grandmother’s Bones are revealed and remembered. They slumber in a point of distant past where the significance of history and connection to that place is a metaphor for the girl of two worlds; of bi
culturalism and otherness. It is she who began the long journey north, to the Country from which the artist belongs.
Grandmother’s Bones rest now, jewel-like, as a prequel to a broader story in which the space that exists between Aboriginality and western painting and place and the Sublime, are carefully considered. Chaffey has spent much of her artistic career negotiating this space. Her award-winning Masters of Philosophy research, north: remembering Country and the Three Trees series join Grandmother’s Bones to complete the connection to her Ancestors.
where our bones might rest are contemporary companions in which stratigraphy and earth layers are offered as quiet spaces of comfort.
a place for our bones opens Friday 21 April at AK Bellinger Gallery, Inverell.
