MEGAN COPE
BORN 1982
BRISBANE, QUEENSLAND
LIVES STRADBROKE ISLAND, QUEENSLAND /MELBOURNE, VICTORIA
The silencing and deletion of Aboriginal peoples and cultures as a tool of colonial control is a core component in Quandamooka artist Megan Cope’s practice. She has created four middens as well as works focused on mapping, returning the original names to places renamed by early colonisers and surveyors.
Cope debunks the myths around the ‘absent’ systems of management, lore, culture, agriculture and fisheries employed by Aboriginal peoples. She brings to light the histories untruthfully written, and highlights the inaccuracies and hypocrisies of the colonial machine we are all subject to, not with bitterness or resentment but with the knowledge of inevitable change and the need to—very simply—tell the truth.
RE FORMATION, part 4, 2018
concrete, copper slag
In archaeological terms, a midden is a mound or deposit containing shells, animal bones, and other refuse that indicates the site of a human settlement. The removal of Aboriginal architectural forms such as middens, as well as the continued mining and excavation of other sacred sites, renders a landscape void of markers once used to navigate through country. What is left is a framework that upholds an invasive colonial narrative while obscuring, submerging and erasing Aboriginal presence on the land.