Amala Groom | Myths & Legends: Popular Sovereignty | 2022 | acrylic on vintage dead stock offset lithograph | 46 x 61cm
Concept development with Madeleine Collie
image courtesy of Amala Groom and David Hagger

Across Western thinking, the Aboriginal experience of transdimensionalism is positioned as fantasy and defined as science fiction. Myths & Legends repositions this fallacy with fifty interventions into popular fantasy illustrator Steve Hickman’s posters. The have become overlayed with bold statements in ethereal red text. This, then, positions aspects of Western operations that, upon deeper reflection, are only real because we believe in them.

This series invites the audience to question the power and authority that we acquiesce to in a civic space … when we are willing subjects … not because we choose or decide to but because we are not not willing.

Across her painterly practice, Groom inverts the four letters of the English alphabet that spell LOVE as a poignant reminder of the Wiradyuri practice of marrumbang (love and kindness).