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Marlene Gilson

Building the Stockade at Eureka

Auction Closed

May 20, 09:03 PM GMT

Estimate

30,000 - 50,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

Marlene Gilson

born 1944


Building the Stockade at Eureka, 2021

Acrylic on linen

Signed and dated on the lower right

39 ⅜ in x 47 ¼ in (100 cm x 120 cm)

The Artist, painted in 2021

Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2021

Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney, Marlene Gilson: My Place – Before, March 4 - 28, 2021

60th International Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Foreigners Everywhere – Stranieri Ovunque, April 20, 2024 – November 24, 2025

Marlene Gilson is a Wadawurrung Elder and Traditional Owner whose meticulously executed narrative-based paintings reclaim and re-contextualize Australia’s stories of colonisation. In particular, she reinterprets through Indigenous eyes life on her traditional Country, which covers Ballarat, Werribee, Geelong, Skipton and the Otway Ranges in Victoria, at the time of the mid 19th Century gold rushes.

 

Self-taught, Marlene Gilson came to painting in her late 60s, encouraged by her family as a distraction while recovering from illness. Hers is a classic story of an artist finding her voice in later years.

 

Marlene Gilson had always been struck by the fact that the iconic 19th Century colonial paintings of goldfields life that she had loved viewing on her visits to the Art Gallery of Ballarat rarely included depictions of her Wadawurrung ancestors. Yet she knew from stories her grandmother had told her that her forebears, who included her great-grandfather, the Indigenous tribal leader King Billy Baa Nip (King Billy) and his wife Queen Mary, had been integrally involved in goldfields life.

 

Although the arrival of the colonists and miners had radically disrupted traditional Wadawurrung life by clearing land whose vegetation had been a source of food, the Wadawurrung had sought to adapt, remaining on the edges of the new settlements and involving themselves in goldfields commerce by, amongst other roles, using their hunting skills to provide meat to the miners. ‘They sold possum skins rugs and woven baskets. Some were black trackers and mounted police. And later, circus performers’, the artist has recalled.1

 

 “Then I started to research and read a lot of the stories. And I thought, you know, these people stated that there was no surviving Wadawurrung, but there was: one was my great-grandfather,” she explains. “I wanted to put our tribe, the Wadawurrung, back on the map. That’s what I set out to do.”2

 

Marlene Gilson decided to revisit some of these 19th Century images of day-to-day life but to include Wadawurrung figures, as well as others who had been left out of the ‘colonial story’, such as the Chinese miners and market gardeners. Speaking of Gilson’s work, leading First Nations Curator Coby Edgar has commented: ‘What I love about her work, is that she doesn’t just tell the story of her Aboriginal ancestors, she tells the story of everyone who was there. She doesn’t leave any race of peoples out of the story or diminish the roles they played in our history.”3

 

Gilson’s career trajectory has been impressive. In 2018 the Curator of the 21st Biennale of Sydney, Mori Art Museum Director Mami Kataoka included Marlene Gilson’s paintings in a major presentation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, generating enormous interest from both Australian and international audiences, the vast majority of whom were seeing her work for the first time. Since then, Marlene Gilson’s work has been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and numerous other major public and private collections.

 

Most recently, in 2024, seven works by Marlene Gilson were included in Foreigners Everywhere, Curator Adriano Pedrosa’s central exhibition of the 60th International Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia:

 

The current painting, Building the Stockade at Eureka, 2021 was the central and largest artwork in the Venice presentation. It depicts the lead-up to one of the seminal events in Australian colonial history, the construction of a fortified Stockade on the Eureka Goldfield near Ballarat by disaffected miners who, contesting the expense and administration of miners' licenses, had broken out in open rebellion against the Imperial authorities. The resulting attack by colonial government forces on the Eureka Stockade early on the morning of 3 December 1854 resulted in the deaths of at least 22 miners and five soldiers.


The rebellion of miners at Eureka Stockade is widely regarded as a key event in the development of Australia’s political systems and attitudes towards democracy and equality.

 

In Building the Stockade At Eureka, 2021, Gilson depicts Wadawurrung men aiding miners to build the Stockade under the watchful eyes of the British troopers. The newly created Eureka flag, to whom the rebelling miners swore allegiance rather than to the Union Jack, flies proudly above. (The use of the flag, featuring a depiction of the Southern Cross on a navy background, has become a symbol of the labour movement in Australia).


Around them, day-to-day life continues: miners can be seen at their pit-heads, children play, Chinese miners work in their market gardens and, in the foreground, Wadawurrung go about their daily routines in an encampment.

 

Members of a five piece German brass band, who although allied to the Circus, were ordered at gunpoint by the miners’ leaders to lead a march that gathered miners to work on the Stockade, and to continue playing while it was being built, can be seen in full lederhosen, while outside Jones & Noble’s Circus tent, the ringmaster and several young Wadawurrung men – who were recruited for their skills as acrobats and riders – are shown practicing their routines.

 

In every section of the painting are figures living out vignettes of goldfields life, oblivious of the impending conflict and destruction that would eventually be seen as a watershed in Australian colonial history.

 

Marlene Gilson is rapidly cementing her reputation as one of the most singular voices in Australian contemporary art today. Part ‘history paintings’, part imaginative renderings of the colonial project, and part an inclusive revisiting of many of the icons of 19th century Australian landscape painting, Marlene Gilson’s works, are both singly and as a group, political statements – asserting in their own gentle, subtle but immensely powerful way that the Country of her Wadawurrung mob ‘Always Was, Always Will Be, Aboriginal Land.’

 

As she said when speaking at the opening of the 60th La Biennale di Venezia:


“It’s my way to connect, to connect and preserve our history for future generations (...) Each brushstroke contributes to placing my family history on the world map and back into the history books."

 



1 Marlene Gilson quoted in ‘How an artist brought Dolly Parton – or her likeness – to the Opera House’, Sydney Morning Herald, April 23, 2021

2 Marlene Gilson quoted in ‘Marlene Gilson’s Histories of Home’, Art Guide, March 3, 2021

3 Coby Edgar quoted in ‘Marlene Gilson’, Artist Profile, Issue 57