Jasmine Togo-Brisby
It Is Not a Place

Jasmine Togo-Brisby is an Australian South Sea Islander artist based in Meanjin/Brisbane. As children, her great-great-grandparents were taken from Vanuatu to work as domestic servants for the Wunderlich family in Sydney and later worked on a plantation. Togo-Brisby’s work examines the Pacific slave trade and its impact on those who trace their roots to Australia through its practices.

Togo-Brisby conjures with an iconography of tall ships, decorative ceilings, and crow feathers. Her ships remind us of the dangerous vessels that transported tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders to Australia; her decorative ceilings recall the refined pressed-tin ceilings made by the Wunderlich family; and her crow feathers refer to 'blackbirding', the nineteenth-century practice of deceiving, coercing, or kidnapping Islanders into servitude.

The exhibition features two major new works—a sculpture and a video. In the sculpture, crow feathers cascade from a decorative ceiling rosette, reminding us that Australian 'civil' society was built on violence. In the video—a haunting computer animation—a ship, made of crow wings, sails on a churning ocean crafted from crow feathers.

Togo-Brisby's title It Is Not a Place complicates matters. It is a negative response to a question it assumes we have asked, or an assumption we have made. It makes us wonder to what extent her work speaks to an actual place—a demarcated location in time and space—or something else.