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Dr. Pamela Croft
Born 1955
Kooma clan, of the Uralarai people, SW Queensland lives and works from her studio near Keppel Sands on the Capricorn Coast in Central Queensland, Australia.
Dr. Pamela Croft has practised as a visual artist since the mid-eighties, an academic who lectured in Queensland and the Northern Territory, Australia. She has facilitated and coordinated various community cultural development projects, curates exhibitions, worked in curriculum design, implementation evaluation and various other community consultancy and projects. She is an active member and representative for Indigenous and community art groups advocating for artists rights, social justice, self-determination and empowerment. She is the first Indigenous person to gain a Doctor of Visual Arts.
The visual narratives of Dr. Croft are constructs of a land-centred, bothways philosophy to create alternative story sites for identity and displacement, histories, sense of place and the effects of colonisation. Pamela has been producing prints and works on paper, painting, sculptural assemblage, and installation with mixed media including found objects. Pamela has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and internationally in solo, group and collaborative projects including public art. She was awarded artist-in-residence status in USA, France and the Philippines. Her artwork is represented in public and private collections both nationally and internationally. Many publications include the works of Dr. Pamela Croft.
"I portray the importance of tradition, recognition of ancestors, respect for uniqueness in spiritual expression, facilitation of an understanding within the contexts of history and culture, a sense of place, connections to family and community, commitment to educational and social transformation that recognises and empowers the inherent strength of Aboriginal peoples and cultures with challenges to non-Aboriginal people to truly listen and absorb in order to move to a place of understanding of our world."
Pamela has exhibited throughout Australia, Europe, Asia and The United States Of America. Some of her most successful exhibits have been in Brisbane, Sydney, Amsterdam, Paris, Manilla, Houston and Atlanta. Pamela is a “stolen generation” child and tells the stories of her ordeal and healing process throughout her work. She uses “both ways” methodology to explain her life as an Aboriginal woman growing up in a Western society. This “both ways” methodology utilizes Western and Aboriginal techniques, education and style to tell the stories of an artist who can see that all people are very similar and yet very different, the challenge is to embrace those differences rather than reject them.
The Mud Map Process:
Darumbal country is my "home" environment and my backyard includes the muddy mangrove banks of the upper regions of Pumpkin and Coorooman Creeks at Keppel Sands, on the Capricorn Coast in Queensland, Australia. I was drawn to the saltwater mangrove creeks surrounding my property. I would wander through the mangroves along its banks often sitting and watching the ebb and flow of the tide for hours. This was my healing place and I wanted to share it with others. I began to produce monoprints from the ebb and flow of the tides. After I produced a number of prints, I hung them in my studio and realised the visual narrative was a story of healing and hope. The mixed-media monoprint continued the theme of investigating concepts of identity and belonging by exploring and mapping the colonial, botanical and indigenous layers of memories within landscape sites. I began to use different colour muds as my printing block and included a variety of mixed media (mud, ochre, pigment and oil paints). In the creation of the mud map monoprints, my body rediscovered its lost unity, its energies and impulses, its rhythms and its flux.
Each mud map is likened to cultural text, as a fluid interactive process which records past and present journeys imprinted within the Australian landscape. The term "mud map" is used when someone draws directions to find a particular address, place, town or village. The maps trace the tracks of animals and peoples, connections and relationships to spaces and places, symbols, patterns and colours. "The crabs imprint their presence as they forage for food, as do the Ibis and seagulls. She [Pamela] knows the way the moon and the sun impact on the tidal flows and how the time of year affects the temperature of the water…She has watched, observed, hunted and gathered in the ways of Aboriginal women, past, present and future" (Fredericks 2002). They describe the environments of reefs, mangrove creeks, saltpans, claypans, and the nomadic nature of the tides, which results in delicate patterns left on the mud that change with each ebb and flow of the water as spiritual waterways. I am tied to water and land, just as all Australians are tied to water and land. These connections and others extend along the time lines of past, present and future and back again. As diverse as we are, we are all connected within the greater web of life. As Fredericks writes, "She knows the region well and moves from one set of images and ideas to the next in a progressive practice of moving to a greater understanding of this land. This evidence of water and animals become stories, recorded in the mud like texts which have been imprinted within the artwork" (Fredericks 2002).
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