On Margaret Preston

 

Still life: fruit (Arnhem Land motif) 1941

Foreign fruits, gouged from their comfort – placed under an ochre light and celebrated as if they were made from the coloured soil they blended into. Like a shifting façade, this painting appears to have the sweetness of its cut fruit that rests so easily in a woven basket, the fleshy papaya still sticky from the sugars of its juice. The folds of the blanket seem to pull and tug the contents of the bountiful pantry into this controlled tumbling. It feels safe, and the fullness of this still life persuades our eyes to rest on its composition, but this is no ordinary still life.

I never really liked Margaret Preston. My first impressions were cemented by that story of how she threw cake at Thea Proctor and her dubious comments on appropriation that in my eyes, only perpetuated colonial practices. I could see her ambition, but it wasn’t one I could respect. From where I stood, I saw the story and the art of someone who had taken and continues to take from others. Exploitation may be a word too far, but her respect of Indigenous technique and aesthetic were only skin deep.

Now her reputation is deeply entrenched in our cultural narrative of reconciliation, and we see her as a pioneer of bridging these gaps, but I simply can not agree. If there is anything I take from this work, it is alienation – papaya, fruit imported into Australian shores in the late 1800s, painted in Arnhem Land motifs make both the process and the subject strangers to each other. It may comfort at first glance but linger any longer and dissonance begins to echo.