Artist Profile 56. Megan Cope.
Hannah Donnelly. Artist Profile. Aug 26 2021.
https://artistprofile.com.au/megan-cope/
In Artist Profile 56, Megan Cope spoke with Hannah Donnelly about the entanglement of language and Country, the connection between tourist markets and the development of practice, cartography, and community engagement.
It’s week three of another lockdown and for once, I am looking forward to my next Zoom of the day – my interview with Noonuccal and Ngugi artist Megan Cope. From my apartment located in one of the exiled suburbs of Western Sydney, Megan takes me to her childhood, isolated in regional Tasmania, where her entertainments were limited: siblings, fishing, hanging out with the chooks and reading the Rolling Stone magazine purchased from the fortunes of her chook egg money. Her family made everything from scratch. This upbringing equipped her with the tools she needed to get through the pandemic, and deeply informs her art, which speaks to her relationships with the environment, and the people who are inseparable to each place.
I ask Megan if there is a starting point for her practice and she answers with survival. Her first development was prescribed by the colonial interpretation of what Aboriginal art should be. She remembers fighting with a teacher as a teenager. The Aboriginal kids at school were invited to contribute artwork for a book called Taraba by Rosemary Ransom, an elder in Tasmania. It led to a commission by another community-controlled organisation. Megan recalls lifts to the art shop with her stepmother where she had to hand over money meant for art supplies, to go to bottle shop. “In a functional family without those traumas I would have had confidence and autonomy earlier in my practice, but I didn’t respect art or know the power of it, that didn’t come till I was working in the factory painting boomerangs.”
She was sixteen then, having moved to Queensland to get some space from family. At the dole office one day, clicking idly while waiting for the forms to be done, she saw a job post titled “Aboriginal artist.” She applied, dropped out of year eleven, and started at the boomerang factory. “I thought that was honourable. White people make you feel that way – they don’t tell you your rights, they don’t tell you what you should have, they tell you where you should be and that’s one foot hanging off the edge of a cliff.” Getting paid $3.60 an hour finally felt like independence. She didn’t need to borrow, hock, or sell stuff to pay rent now. But she fast learnt the dishonourable intentions of an industry that allows carpetbaggers and fake art to thrive.
They promised Megan things would get better but after ten months she was sick of making compromises; hitch-hiking to work because she couldn’t afford the bus or hanging around the fish and chips shop hoping the old Yaya would feel sorry for her and give her some chips. She ran out of patience. “I hope I still have that severance letter. It says: Megan walked into the office on this date and said she was leaving to quote ‘do her own thing.’ I had reached my limit. Then it was fascinating how my whole life changed.” On quitting, Megan discovered she had a case worker at Centrelink who wasn’t aware she was a teenager living away from home – she was back-paid enough to start her own business.
I want to point to this connection between tourism markets, economic scarcity, and the development of practice; often, for the artists participating in the creation of touristic objects, it is a matter of necessity, of doing what is required to be fed. Without negatively affecting vulnerable people, it’s possible to have a broader dialogue, critique, and interpretation of regional styles. We must understand that artists are capable of developing expansive contemporary practices when given the opportunity and support to do so.
Megan had observed a lot in that factory – their suppliers and buyers. She started selling artefacts and objects wholesale to shops in Byron Bay. “I was a kid doing what I needed to get by. I did one painting that was personal from my family, connected to our three clans, our totem and creator.” She got heckled by the buyer and she parted with this work for $40 and later found out the painting sold for $650. “I grabbed my Aboriginal artefacts and stormed out of the shop, chucked everything in the car, bawling my eyes out on the drive back to the Gold Coast. I rang Nan on the landline and told her what’s going on. She said: ‘You don’t need to paint dots to be Aboriginal Megan, you are just Aboriginal, and if you like art then why don’t you go to Art School?’”
Megan studied at BoVA CIAI at Griffith, and it was artist Vernon Ah Kee who processed her interview application. Later, she finished studies in Victoria at the Institute of Koorie Education. Before focusing on her own practice, she led an artist-run initiative called Tinygold with Mariam Arcilla who is now at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. She later became the creative director of the BARI festival and she started connecting with proppaNOW. For Megan, proppaNOW had built a solid pdeagogy she could identify with. She worked at CAIA, tutoring in Indigenous Art Practices and Protocols, a compulsory course for mainstream. Megan reflects on the experience of being mid-20s and full of yourself. “I would stand at the front of the classroom: hands up who can speak in an Aboriginal language? No one? Well, who goes surfing on the weekend down at Currumbin? A few — do you really think Currumbin is an English word!” It was from that teaching perspective that she began exploring concepts of maps and placenames still central to her practice.
Her cartography work provides a methodology for working in community. It highlights our Country, showing Aboriginal relationality to place on a scale that people aren’t used to seeing, as in You Are Here Now, 2015. The process for these maps is now a pedagogy itself, Megan collaborates with community participation; drawing workshops and artworks overlaid that highlight specific parts of country that the community see themselves in, or are important for them to include. When she first started this work around place, it was seen by some as taboo. Language is always changing, so Megan deliberately includes different spellings on maps of the same place – Minjerribah sometimes with an “H” and sometimes without – to reflect how it’s said. The fact that this plays havoc with the English language, with colonial consistency, only makes it better. Megan laughs while telling me about a whitefella who asked if she knew the Aboriginal name for his suburb. “I said (sarcastically), well back in the dreamtime we didn’t have suburbs.”
Place is particularly complex in settler colonial contexts, which is highlighted by Megan’s work on military maps that don’t have Aboriginal Nation boundaries. Megan said early map work was contentious for some Aboriginal communities because we haven’t resolved boundaries that are distorted by state and federal legislation like Native Title. Colonial relationships to land are about property and possession and even after colonisation, suburbs are relatively new concepts. Our relationship to land doesn’t exist within those systems. It is really encouraging for Megan that national conversations like place names in addresses are happening within an organisation like Australia Post.
Megan’s interrogation of place took on new dimensions in ‘RE FORMATION,’ a series of three that shifts and remembers through each hand-made layer of black sand, copper slag and cement oyster shells, recreating an historic marker of community presence, but also a healing from its absence. The first presentation of this concept was ‘Frontier Imaginaries’ at QUT Art Museum, 2016. For Megan, the concept started as a critique on the forgotten annexation of cultural sites by non-Indigenous people; the surf lifesaving club at moolomba/Point Lookout was built on a midden. These colonial practices haunt us: sacred sites commandeered by churches, sites of ceremony usurped by centres of neo-capitalist endeavours, the erasure of even middens as evidence of Aboriginal place. The reality is that every colonial place was and is an Aboriginal place. Megan talks about how this disrespect permeates the national psyche and unconsciously informs people’s actions and attitude: “White people build their drinking sites over our community sites, and then we are typecast as the drunks.”
The moment that turned the ‘RE FORMATION’ series into something else for Megan was the second edition of ‘Frontier Imaginaries’ presented in Palestine. The location allowed Megan to imagine materially-different middens. Still working with concrete and ilmenite, she couldn’t transport the black sand due to the weight, and Megan worked with some local Palestinians who took her to a significant site near Bethlehem to collect earth. “I made middens about removal of our middens and we dug up earth together for the Palestinian people, to recognise their struggle, their cultural heritage being stripped and their existence rendered from the land.”
RE FORMATION III now focused on extraction and middens being removed and turned into something else for money. Working with Anneke Jaspers, the curator for ‘The National 2017: New Australian Art,’ Megan achieved a new scale for her concept. Many people have no idea how large these middens were before their desecration; this presentation was an opportunity to make something monumental and transform the Australian imagination. Still, RE FORMATION part 3 (Dubbagullee), 2017, is not even close to the size of the middens Megan references on Quandamooka Country or the site of the Sydney Opera House, but it is an attempt to help audiences learn about this overlooked history.
“Art is my centre that keeps me safe and strong,” Megan says, “because through it I’m working on things that reveal histories that reposition my community and others in a positive light.” From her early childhood through to her artistic practice today, Megan Cope lets nothing go to waste, repurposing and reframing what has been taken for granted to illuminate essential truths about our relationship to the world, and our obligation to take better care of it. She is now planning to hone in on projects that restore country and transcend the limitations of the white cube to work with infrastructure that acknowledges the reality of our diminishing natural resources on earth. Her installation Untitled (Death Song), 2020, repurposes discarded objects of mining and industrial equipment to form sound sculptures and will be presented at Palais De Tokyo next year as part of ‘Reclaim the Earth.’ Megan will also be presenting a new collaborative work with in community on Gundangurra Country at the Ngununggula gallery opening in September 2021.
This essay was originally published in Artist Profile, Issue 56, 2021. Images courtesy the artist, Australian Print Workshop, Canberra Glassworks, Milani Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and UNSW Galleries..