Katrina Doolan

Artist Statement

I was born in Mildura and grew with my extended family - mother, father, brothers and sisters, grandparents, cousins, aunties and uncles in makeshift dwellings between the road and the Murray River at Gol Gol, moving camps between the road and the riverbank with the seasons.

I started making art in 2008 at Sunraysia TAFE, completing ATSICA III and IV in Visual Arts and am now completing Second Year Diploma.  I have exhibited my works in group exhibitions with Sunraysia TAFE and in community venues. In 2009 I won first prize in the MADEC competition for a photo of my sons performing traditional dance. In 2012 I won the Highly Commended Award at the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards for ceramic  and echidna quill installation entitled Babies Are Our Future.

My inspiration is my family - six generations from my great grandmother to my grandchildren. I work in a variety of media from clay, to black and white photography, digital manipulation of photos, and assemblage and sculpture using objects found at the old campsites where I grew up. Collecting these objects has been an emotional experience for me expressed in my art. As I walked around the sites I was amazed that these objects have remained exposed to the elements for over twenty-five years since we were evicted from the site.  I found things that I played with as a child - my cane dolly's basket, missing it's bottom with a tree growing through it, broken crockery that I embedded in the mud to make mosaic patterns, the lid of a Sunshine milk tin with a hole to make rolly-pollys, shoes that I wore, a medal I won at school for athletics and hundreds of items from my extended family.  This group of items – the tin, the perfume bottles, the keys, the buckles and the purse I recognized as belonging to my mother and my Nan.

I am inspired by John Cornell and his boxes from the 1970s.