Overview

Dr Fiona Foley is an Aboriginal artist, Badtjala woman and provocateur, part of a highly influential generation of urban Indigenous artists. Over a career now spanning thirty years she has consistently asked questions about hidden histories, the Frontier Wars waged against Aboriginal peoples, and brought the massacres and dispossession into galleries, public spaces and to a broader, societywide debate. In recent years her exploration of the familial threads that join her Aboriginal heritage to the family of white missionaries who came to K'gari/Fraser Island in 1897 emerges as a tour de force. Foley has had exhibitions all over the world. Retrospective exhibitions include Fiona Foley: Veiled Paradise at QUT Art Museum in 2021, Who are these strangers and where are they going? in Ballarat and Sydney in 2019-2020, and Fiona Foley: Forbidden at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane in 2009. Her work is in every major institutional collection in Australia, many private collections, and occupies public spaces all over Australia, including in the State Library of Queensland. At the heart of this book is friendship. It details Foley's meeting with art writer Louise Martin-Chew, the progression of their collegiate relationship, and crucial developments in Foley's art life until her most recent segue into academia. This book was shaped as a biography given the relevance of Foley's life to the work that she makes, and her emotional and historical investment in the disenfranchisement of her Badtjala people-as for all Aboriginal people-as subject matter for her art.

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9780868560038

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Shortlisted for the Magarey Medal for Biography, awarded for an outstanding biographical work. It is jointly awarded by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) and the Australians Historians Association. This is a beautifully composed, intimate first-person account of the artistic practice of Badtjala artist, Fiona Foley. Each chapter meanders and unfolds, taking us on a vivid journey to place--K'gari or Fraser Island--combined with encounters and conversations with the artist, her family and affiliates. Carefully configured and tenderly composed, each chapter has its own rhythm and title extrapolating on how 'art' and 'life' intersect. PROFESSOR NATALIE KING OAM A biography of Fiona Foley--an artist who has changed the algorithm of history. BRONWYN BANCROFT The biography Fiona Foley Provocateur: An Art Life offers an in-depth look at what drives the Badtjala artist. Written by Louise Martin-Chew, this biography is also record of a friendship between artist and author. Filled with intimate details and told in a conversational tone, Fiona Foley Provocateur catalogues not only the trajectory of Foley's life and art practice, but also the historical disenfranchisement and ongoing survival of Aboriginal culture. ART GUIDE, 8 September 2021.

Shortlisted for the Magarey Medal for Biography, awarded for an outstanding biographical work. It is jointly awarded by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) and the Australians Historians Association. This is a beautifully composed, intimate first-person account of the artistic practice of Badtjala artist, Fiona Foley. Each chapter meanders and unfolds, taking us on a vivid journey to place--K'gari or Fraser Island--combined with encounters and conversations with the artist, her family and affiliates. Carefully configured and tenderly composed, each chapter has its own rhythm and title extrapolating on how 'art' and 'life' intersect. PROFESSOR NATALIE KING OAM A biography of Fiona Foley--an artist who has changed the algorithm of history. BRONWYN BANCROFT The biography Fiona Foley Provocateur: An Art Life offers an in-depth look at what drives the Badtjala artist. Written by Louise Martin-Chew, this biography is also record of a friendship between artist and author. Filled with intimate details and told in a conversational tone, Fiona Foley Provocateur catalogues not only the trajectory of Foley's life and art practice, but also the historical disenfranchisement and ongoing survival of Aboriginal culture. ART GUIDE, 8 September 2021.

Author Information

Louise Martin-Chew has written about the visual arts for thirty years. She has contributed regularly to national newspapers, art magazines, exhibition catalogues and books. This biographical project was part of a PhD at the University of Queensland (awarded 2019). After publication by QUT Art Museum in 2021, 'Fiona Foley Provocateur: An Art Life' was awarded Best Book (jointly) by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in 2022 and also shortlisted for the 2022 Magarey Medal for Biography (awarded by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and the Australian Historical Association.

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