North Gallery, 6th July–7th August 2010

Sydney-born artist Clare Fleming completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art in 2009. Her graduate work, Reconcile Yourself! is an ambitious, multi-media installation in which Fleming explores the nature of her identity as a postcolonial, Australian woman and embarks on a journey of personal atonement for what she characterizes as a 'shameful national history.' 1

For Fleming, Australian postcolonial identity - whether of Australia's first peoples or the descendents of European colonists - is complicated by the notion of Australia as a terra nullius (an 'empty land' or 'land belonging to nobody'). Invented by the European colonizers, this fiction justified policies of land ownership and cultural assimilation/obliteration that devastated Australia's indigenous nations.

The centrepiece of Fleming's installation is We Must Not (Lament of the Interloper) - a human/rabbit hybrid, fashioned from salt and resin, that drags a desert-toned mantle bearing a penitent litany of embroidered prohibitions: 'we must not alienate you,' 'we must not disrespect you.' Described by the artist as a 'frozen embodiment of grief and shame,' 2 the rabbit/woman wanders listlessly in search of a home, but is destined only to continually ravage the environment in which she is an alien interloper. The cloak of programmatic admonitions functions as a security blanket offering to provide what Fleming terms a 'utopian ideal for reconciliation.' 3 However, as the artist acknowledges, this is a fantasy that simply perpetuates those Eurocentric, post-Enlightenment ideas (i.e., cultural/national unity achieved through the systematic rationalization/vanishing of difference) from which the entire colonial holocaust proceeded.

This idea is reinforced in Repeat After Me - a mirror bearing the inscription: 'I live in an Aboriginal country.' Germaine Greer proposed this mantra as a first step towards achieving a reconciled Australia.4 Whilst acknowledging Greer's good intentions, Fleming notes that as a formula, it 'falls into the same excellence of unity it tries to unravel' and is thus 'an illusory solution.' 5 The artist's refusal to whitewash the legacy of colonialism is further evident in her video performance: Come Clean. Here, Fleming bathes in the red earth of the Australian outback, as if symbolically washing on a blood-stained past. It is, perhaps, in this willingness to engage with her conflicted and contradictory post-colonial self that the artist finds a way forward. This is no easy thing, but as Fleming's wall display of embroidered pleas and prescriptions proclaims, to live honestly, we have no choice but to embrace the reality that: This is a test...it is difficult...open your heart.

David Khan

1 Clare Fleming, Reconcile Yourself, Artist's Statement, np, nd (c.2010).
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid, quoting Germaine Greer, 'Whitefella jump up: the shortest way to nationhood' in Quarterly essay, i11, 2003.
5 Ibid.

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