Teena McCarthy | ‘Bilyera’ Wedgetail Eagle Totem | 2018
The main theme running throughout my work is related to my grandmother, an Indigenous woman of the Barkindji Tribe from Broken Hill, NSW. I work within narratives, based on her life story, her Dreaming, The Darling River, her Country. Within that context, her story exposes layers of meaning about Australia’s ‘hidden history’: the impact that humanity has done on the natural environment; the effects of Colonisation that have led to the loss of Culture and Spirituality; and, in recent times, the unfortunate events of the Stolen Generations, sadly resulting in much intergenerational pain.
Teena McCarthy is a visual artist and poet who works predominantly in painting, photography and performance art. She graduated in 2014 from UNSW Art & Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction. McCarthy is an Italian Barkindji woman who is a descendant of The Stolen Generations. Her work documents her family’s displacement and Aboriginal Australian’s loss of Culture and their ‘hidden’ history. McCarthy has exhibited extensively over the past seven years, most recently in Four Women: (I do belong) Double, curated by Djon Mundine OAM, Lismore Regional Gallery, 2017, and in Realising Mother, curated by Zurica Pulija, with co-curators Sandy Edwards and Luke Letourneau, Kudos Galleries, UNSW Art & Design, 2017. Her work from this show was featured in an article and interview in The Sydney Morning Herald.
http://artatrium.com.au/teena-mccarthy/
