Shapes of ongoing fascination, shapes of ongoing dismay
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With a practice based around mapping and collecting (including, most recently, Australian fruit and vegetable cartons for ‘The National 2019’), the Brisbane-based artist Sean Rafferty began amassing his ‘Australias’ collection in 2010, pulling examples of the country’s iconographic geographic shape from anywhere and everywhere – milk bottles, socks, company logos, billboards and so on. ‘It started from a curiosity and affection,’ Rafferty tells me over the phone. And grew into a fascination for how the form of Australia ‘has been burnt into our collective retina’, shaping our national consciousness – a concept he credits to artist Philip Brophy. Scrolling through the Instagram @girt_by_sea, where Rafferty collates his substantial collection, it feels like a joyful, whimsical celebration of Australia’s outline and, by extension, Australia as a nation.
Recently, however, Rafferty has started to use his collection of Australias to explore a darker side of our island nation. On 7 December 2020, Rafferty posted a new artwork titled Nauru. It is a collage of Australias with a negative space in the centre, a ghostly silhouette of the Pacific island of Nauru. The caption states that this piece is the ‘first in a series probably called “Current and Former Island Prisons” … Less because of an ongoing fascination with representations of “Australia” and more because of an ongoing dismay with our nation’s treatment of refugees.’
The effect of surrounding the barren space of Nauru with multiple representations of Australia is eerie, portraying the absolute control that the Australian Government has over the lives of the refugees imprisoned there. They are girt, quite literally in this piece and in reality, by Australia. Girt by Australian politics.
Nauru grew from Rafferty’s realisation that, despite years of attending rallies in support of refugees and investing himself in their cause, he ‘had no real idea about what Nauru looked like … It made sense to juxtapose these two forms – this Australia that every Australian can draw from memory and then Nauru, which most people wouldn’t even be able to point to in the Pacific.’
This juxtaposition becomes more poignant on closer inspection, when you read the slogans on the Australias: ‘True Aussie Exports’; ‘Integrated in Australia’; ‘100% Aussie’ and so on. There is a cruel irony in the celebration of exports and integration when, since 2012 over 4000 people have been forcibly exported from Australia to be detained on Nauru or Papua New Guinea (PNG), preventing them from exercising their right to seek asylum.
‘I wanted to define Nauru’s shape with map logos that are kind of jingoistic,’ Rafferty explains. ‘I think the relationship between the celebration of Australia and this national stain is the point of the work.’
For his next piece in the series, Rafferty plans to create PNG’s Manus Island, with the idea of eventually exhibiting the works and raising money for the Refugee Council of Australia or the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. This body of work builds on Rafferty’s fascination with documenting the visual ephemera that surround us on a daily basis, bringing value through the process of mapping and collection to objects that are usually discarded without a thought. In ‘Current and Former Island Prisons’, we see the potential for collections to be mobilised in different ways and contexts to tell new and alternative stories. Rafferty’s work encourages us to see collections as malleable, as things that can be revisited, reconsidered and powerfully reframed.
Lara Chapman
