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“The works in Coastline also map changing ways of seeing the shoreline across five centuries, with a particular focus on modernism,” said Dr Stephen.
She notes, for example, the prominence of Australian women artists around the time of the First World War, as women assumed greater independence and visibility in society. And in recent times the significant transformation of the subject by Indigenous artists.
For instance, Daniel Boyd’s Untitled (2012) takes one of the ‘stick maps’ made by the seafaring people of the Marshall Islands for navigation, and transforms its grid into a dark, glistening abstraction.
A contemporary work by Aotearoa New Zealand artist Fiona Pardington, offers another reclamation. “Life casts of the people of Oceania made in the 19th century, originally served a deeply racist classification,” said assistant curator Katrina Liberiou. “Pardington’s photographs from the series Ahua: A beautiful hesitation (2010)