Fiona Foley: Veiled Paradise

Publication Details Paperback, 176 x 243 mm portrait, 84 pages. ISBN: 978-0-86856-005-02

Author and/or Editor name/s Vanessa Van Ooyen, Angelina Hurley and Sandra Phillips

Author and/or Editor bio/s Vanessa Van Ooyen is the Director, QUT Galleries & Museums.

Angelina Hurley curated the exhibition Fiona Foley: Veiled Paradise. She is an Aboriginal woman from Brisbane of Gooreng Gooreng, Mununjali, Birriah and Gamilaraay heritage. A writer, her short film Aunty Maggie and the Womba Wakgun was produced by Screen Australia’s The New Black series 2009. She was the recipient of the American-Australian Fulbright Commission’s Indigenous Scholarship in 2010, attending the Tisch School of Art at NYU in 2011.

Associate Professor Sandra Phillips is the Associate Dean (Indigenous Engagement) in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Queensland.

Year of publication 2021

Publisher QUT Art Museum, Brisbane

Abstract To accompany the exhibition Fiona Foley: Veiled Paradise, QUT Art Museum publishes a rich catalogue of works from the exhibition with accompanying essays by curator, Angelina Hurley and academic, Sandra Phillips.

Veiled Paradise surveys over three decades of Badtjala artist Fiona Foley’s practice. This leading contemporary Aboriginal artist’s work is informed by her ancestral connection to K’Gari/Fraser Island, drawing equally upon its serene beauty and the history of systemic violence and sexual exploitation perpetrated on its shores.

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue address issues commonly addressed by the artist – from Government-regulated opium trade to the connection between sex and violence on the frontier and beyond. Tirelessly, through painting, photography, film, sculpture and printmaking, Foley gives voice to the dispossessed. From the founding of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in Redfern in the mid-1980s, to now, Veiled Paradise sees some of Foley’s most iconic works and some of her less-seen works put into the spotlight.