Linda Sproul's white woman project
In her ongoing series of works titled The White Woman Project, Linda Sproul interrogates the complicity of white women in the 'civilising mission ' of imperialism in Australia. 1 Though the project is informed by paradigms of both feminism and postcolonialism, Sproul's concerns are not exclusively ideological. Her approach tends to be dialectical, perhaps close to that suggested by Anne McClintoch, who isolates ' the invention of whiteness' as the problem to be investigated: 'race, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other . .. Rather, they come into existence in and through relation to each other- if in contradictory and conflictual ways. '2 Sproul, too, is conscious of constructing her art out of a matrix which includes her personal history, art history, and cultural and social history.
Sproul's research into the meaning of the white woman in the Australian social imaginary led her inevitably towards well known pictures from nineteenth century visual culture. Images such as A summer morning tiff by the Heidelberg School artist, Tom Roberts, have been absorbed so fluently into our cultural memory that their meaning and appeal is popularly believed to be 'timeless' .3 Sproul is concerned with the power of such images, not only as they exist in an historical past, but as they continue to circulate in the present and shape our personal and collective identity. She believes that we live in an age of 'maximum surface value' , surrounded by most 'extraordinary, seamless surface images ', but she is unwilling to accept the theoretical impasse that meaning is always already written on bodies, texts, or images. As distinct from meaning always being inscribed, she... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline