Troublesome Statues

My Honours year in lockdown was about how Captain Cook statues are a daily reminder of Indigenous Australians' repressed history and genocide; the question is, do we pull the statues down, place them in museums or statue gardens, or amend them? Troublesome Statues establishes a Cook figurine in suburban domestic settings challenging our collective memory of one figure continuously memorialised in history.

The inspiration for Cook in domestic settings was the 2021 Covid lockdowns in Melbourne. We were only allowed to travel 5 kilometres so these images were completed at my daughter’s brick veneer home close-by which proved an ideal location to emphasise the idea of banal domesticity in suburbia. Cook was presented as an ineffectual interior decor object or harmless garden ornament. I produced a book as no exhibition was permitted. The absurd titles are taken from notes and stories about Cook’s life and voyages.