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One of Rea’s earliest memories of childhood is her mother’s history lessons. Growing up in the early 1960s in the north-western New South Wales country town of Coonabarabran, Rea learnt about the past and the present from a collection of black and white photographs her mother kept in an old biscuit tin.[1] In parts and fragments, these photographs told the story of the displacement of the Gamilaroi people by generations of white settlers. Over the years Rea has produced an extraordinary body of work based loosely around ‘archival’ text and images. Often beginning from the base of black and white photographs of friends and relations, Rea scans the images into a computer where they undergo a complex process of recuperation and reinvention. Crossed by currents of feminism and post-colonialism, her images and object installations are linked by at least two man concerns. Firstly, an attempt to recapture the past from denial and distortion, as a politicised site of remembering. Secondly, to explore discriminatory power relations marking representations of what she calls the blak body.[2]
As a primary site of competing struggles and multiple inscriptions, the blak body functions throughout Rea’s work as more than just a passive object to the deciphered and described. On the contrary, it serves as an active an productive force to be engaged. Viewed as a contested borderline between the social and political, re-presentations of the body of her work would appear to serve two main purposes. Firstly, they serve as a vehicle with which to communicate layers of repressed or denied speech; secondly, as a metaphorical site and surface across which new forms of Aboriginal agency are contested and inscribed. Appealing neither to... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline