Promiscuous Provenance

PROMISCUOUS PROVENANCE explores our colonial past with direct reference to the works of the early colonial artists’ and their first encounters with the Australian landscape, including John Hunter, the Port Jackson Painter, and George Raper. As artists seeing a new world of flora and fauna for the first time, their works illustrate the strangeness of this encounter; in his journal, Hunter describes the creatures he sees as coming about through ‘a promiscuous intercourse between the different sexes of all these different animals’.

Australian artist, Anna Glynn elaborates on Hunter’s idea of “promiscuous intercourse” by creating her own alien creatures, hybrid manifestations of the original colonists’ art that sometimes includes the colonists themselves.These contemporary works reflect her fascination with the strangeness of the past, as unknown and unfamiliar to her as the antipodean fauna was to them. The core of the exhibition is her alien creatures realised in a series of ink drawings accompanied by video work, sculpture and installation bringing them to life as artefacts of the imagination and objects of wonder and curiosity.

In developing the exhibition Glynn is working with a number of public institutions both in Australia and internationally including the State Library of NSW, Historic Houses Trust of NSW, the Natural History Museum (London), the Australian Museum and the British Museum. These collaborations will ensure the works are grounded in research and a well-developed understanding of the history and documentation of the period.