Mia Boe
Mia Boe is a Brisbane-based painter whose work is strongly informed by her matrilineal Butchulla heritage from K’gari (Fraser Island). Her practice brings attention to conflicted Indigenous histories, revealing the deep-rooted suffering Aboriginal Australians continue to experience today.
Image credit: Mia Boe, The New Normal, 2020, acrylic on linen 45 x 60 cm. Courtesy the artist
When did you start painting and what inspired you to first pick up the brush?
I first started painting in high school, but I’ve only been focusing on it full-time for the past 18 months. I’m not sure what inspired me to paint. When I was younger I was very into Brisbane-based, politically-engaged Indigenous artists like Gordon Bennett, Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee. And I still am.
How has your family and familial histories influenced your work?
My mother is a Butchulla woman and my father is Burmese. My disinheritance of both of these cultures focuses my work. Which is to say, much of my painting responds, sometimes obliquely, to the British Empire’s deliberate, violent interferences with the cultural heritages of Burma and K’gari (Fraser Island).
The figures in your artworks often have fragile, elongated bodies. How did this distinct aesthetic develop?
You’re right! They’re also often swollen and distended. I started doing figures like this a few years ago. I guess they began in an attempt to create a silhouette of how I felt in my body at the time – uneasy, strange, awkward. Another obvious source of inspiration for this style is the paintings of Russell Drysdale, which have become increasingly important to me. I can’t say exactly what attracted me to his gaunt, spindly-legged characters in devastatingly dry, sometimes burnt-out backgrounds. Their weirdness, and their sadness, I suppose.
Can you talk about the inspiration behind your recent exhibition Black Devil (2021) at Open House Collective in Brisbane?
Black Devil began as a response to the genocides committed by the Queensland Native Police. Between 1849 and 1904 these detachments of Aboriginal troopers, led by white officers, massacred around 44,000 Aboriginal people in the colony of Queensland in a brutal effort to break local resistance to colonisation. Native Police troopers did not arrest, detain or lock up; their job was ‘dispersal,’ an official euphemism for genocide. Many troopers were kidnapped and conscripted as boys, and were often barracked and trained thousands of kilometres from their homes and kin. This is what happened to my great-great-great Uncle Wonamutta (Jack Noble), a Butchulla man. Wonamutta was also seconded as a tracker to the Victorian Police to help capture Ned Kelly.
Some of the works in the exhibition counter Sidney Nolan’s own striking representations of Australia’s most famous folk hero. Other works affiliate the lawlessness of the exterminationist Native Police with the violence of contemporary policing. The exhibition title comes from Ned Kelly’s reference to Aboriginal trackers as “little black devils.”
You just finished a degree in art history last year. How has this study informed your artmaking?
It has probably led me to more research-intensive art projects, like Black Devil. I also now make more work that is explicitly responsive to artists I have studied, like Nolan, Drysdale or Goya. Some awareness of artistic forerunners and precedents is probably good, because then you can discover kindred spirits (or enemies) in the archive of world art, and that can be a great source of creative energy. But I wouldn’t want my art to decline simply into references to other artists.
What is next for your practice?
What are you most excited for?
I’m about to start my Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts. My work has recently been more centred around environmental degradation.
This year, I’d like to learn more
about K’gari’s ecological and land
management history.
Mia Boe: Black Devil showed at Open House
Collective, Brisbane in January 2021.
