Julie Gough

In 1986, Gough completed a Bachelor of Arts (pre-history and anthropology) at the University of Western Australia, and in 1994, she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of Art at Curtin University. In 1993, she moved from Perth to Tasmania to undertake her doctorate exploring her family history and heritage.[1]

Her thesis focused on reinterpreting the past via the artistic display of disparate objects which reframe narratives, completed at the University of Tasmania in 2001.[2]

Gough's sculptural works have included the use of kitsch bric-a-brac sourced from op shops, often featuring racist or dated motifs.[3] Using these relics in her art is about challenging and subverting their historical meanings.[4]

In 2001, her work, Driving Black Home (2000) contrasted with John Glover's colonial depiction of Tasmania, as part of the Australian Collection Focus series at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The Gallery withheld Benjamin Law's busts of Woureddy and Trucaninny from the exhibition at Gough's request,[5] noting their history as anthropological objects.

In September 2001, she presented on the "Archaeology of nostalgia" at the Portraiture and Place symposium (jointly run by the National Portrait Gallery and the University of Tasmania).[6]

For the bicentenary of Federation, Gough was commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria to create an artwork in response to Emanuel Phillips Fox's The Landing of Captain Cook.[7] The resulting installation, Chase, a suspended ti-tree forest with symbolic red cloth, was reviewed by Gabriella Coslovich as sitting in an "...uneasy relationship..." in display alongside Fox's painting.[8] Margaretta Pos reviewed the work as having stillness and menace, with a sense of "...redcoats in the shadows."[9] One of the Gallery's deputy art directors, Frances Lindsay, described the work as extending the narrative from the painting, to the unseen context of displacement of Aboriginal people.[10]

Gough's undertook a residency at Woolmers Estate in 2018, researching her familial connections to Norfolk Plains, Woolmers and Brickendon estates.[11]

A survey exhibition of her work entitled Tense Past: Julie Gough opened at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 2019.[12]

She worked as a curator of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Victoria from 2003 until December 2004.[13] She was a lecturer in visual arts at the James Cook University in 2005,[14] and as of July 2019 also has a part-time role at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.[15]

In 2020 Gough featured as one of six Indigenous artists in the ABC TV series This Place: Artist Series. The series is a partnership between the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Gallery of Australia, in which the producers travelled to the countries of "some of Australia's greatest Indigenous artists to share stories about their work, their country, and their communities".[16][17]

• Arts Tasmania Wilderness Residency, 2001
• Indigenous research joint grant (with Greg Lehman and Margaret Walter), Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, for a biography of Woretemoteyener, June 2003[18]
• Visual Arts and Crafts Board Fellowship, Australian Council for the Arts, 2006[19]
• State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship, 2006[20]
• State Library of Tasmania Research Fellowship, 2006
• Artist in Residence, Turner Galleries, 2007[21]
• Redlands Westpac Art Prize, 2009[22]
• Australia Council residency, Kluge-Ruhe in Virginia, 2017
• Helen Lempriere Scholarship, 2017[23]
• Arts Tasmania residency, 2018 (funding awarded in 2017)

Gough's work is held in public collections, including:

Art Gallery of New South Wales

• Bind, sculpture (2008)[24]
• Dark Valley, Van Diemen's Land, sculpture (2008)[25]

National Gallery of Australia

• Human nature and material culture, installation (1994)[26]
• She was sold for one guinea, assemblage (2007)[27]
• The chase, assemblage (2008)[28]
• Some Tasmanian Aboriginal children living with non-Aboriginal people before 1840, assemblage (2008)[29]
• Hunting Ground (Haunted) & (Pastoral) Van Diemen's Land, film and prints (2016)[30]

National Gallery of Victoria

• Imperial Leather, sculpture (1994)[31]
• Chase, sculpture (2001)[32]
• Leeawuleena, sculpture (2001)[33]
• Night Sky Journey and Tracking Self, installation (2001)[34]
• Kelp water carrier, sculpture (2005)[35]
• Drift, sculpture (2005)[36]
• Lifebearer, sculpture (2005)[37]
• Seam, sculpture (2005)[38]
• Land and sky from sea 1[39] and Land and sky from sea 2,[40] paintings (2005)
• Observance, film on USB (2011-2012)[41]

• Official website
• Profile from Art Gallery of NSW
• Profile on Trove