Fiona Foley

Feb 02, 2024

The Badtjala artist from K'gari who helped build the platform for urban Aboriginal art in Australia

In 1987, ten Aboriginal artists based in Sydney came together to establish the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, a space for urban Indigenous artists who were neither supported by remote community art centres nor visible within the mainstream Australian art world. Fiona Foley was among the founding ten, alongside Michael Riley, Bronwyn Bancroft, and Tracey Moffatt. She was 23 years old and had just completed her Bachelor of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, where she had been one of the first Indigenous students enrolled. Boomalli became the launching pad for some of the most significant careers in contemporary Aboriginal art. Foley's own career, now spanning four decades, has moved steadily from that founding act outward into photography, sculpture, installation, public art, curation, writing, and a PhD.

Foley was born in 1964 in Maryborough, Queensland, and raised in Hervey Bay and briefly Mount Isa. She is a member of the Wondunna clan of the Badtjala people, the traditional owners of K'gari (Fraser Island), the world's largest sand island. Her mother, Shirley Foley, spent twenty years researching and recording Badtjala language and culture, producing a Badtjala/English dictionary and establishing the Thoorgine Educational and Culture Centre on the island in 1988. That work of recovery and documentation runs parallel to Fiona's own. Her great-uncle Wilf Reeves and great-aunt Olga Miller wrote and illustrated The Legends of Moonie Jarl in the 1960s, a text of Badtjala creation stories that has been a significant reference point throughout her practice.

After completing a Certificate of Arts at East Sydney Technical College in 1983, her Bachelor of Visual Arts in 1986, and a Diploma of Education in 1987, Foley also studied at St Martins School of Art in London. She had spent time in Arnhem Land, visiting communities at Maningrida and Ramingining, and the aerial perspective and symbolic abstraction she encountered there shaped the minimalism of her early pastels and paintings. Works including Men's Business (1987-89) and Salt Water Islands (1992) reflect that influence, countering ethnographic depictions of Indigenous culture with a meditative, insider view.

The political sharpens as her practice develops. Works such as Badtjala Woman (1994) and Native Blood (1994) use photography to invert the colonial gaze, positioning Foley as both subject and author of images that critique the West's long habit of idealising and displaying Indigenous women as specimens. Her installations incorporate Badtjala language, traditional materials, and references to specific histories of dispossession. In 1992 she co-curated Tyerabarrbowaryaou at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, the first major exhibition to show urban Aboriginal artists in a museum context.

Her PhD, completed in 2017, focused on the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and its effects on the Badtjala people. The research fed directly into her art. The act, which controlled almost every aspect of Aboriginal life in Queensland under the guise of protection, is one of the legal instruments through which the Badtjala were removed from K'gari and their culture suppressed. Making that history visible, in art that operates simultaneously as scholarship and as image, is the thread running through everything she does.

Her public commissions include works for the Museum of Sydney, Brisbane City Mall, the Australian National University, and Redfern Park. Her work is held in major Australian state and national collections, the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, and the British Museum in London. It has been shown internationally including at Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and Aboriginal Art in Modern Worlds at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

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