Autumn Hanging

Colour Correction Series 'Sunshine & Lollipops'

KONSTANTINA (KATE) CONSTANTINE

Colour Correction Series 'Sunshine & Lollipops' 600 x 600 mm Synthetic Polymer Paints on Canvas KFA222501

COLOUR CORRECTION SERIES When you fix a mistake, you make a correction, a change that rights a wrong. When you correct a misspelled word, you've made a correction. Well done! Correction also applies to punishment, which is another way to right a wrong. A correction is an improvement or a revision when there's something that needs to be fixed. 
Konstantina known for powerful use of colour has put together a series of work that annotates today’s political and socio-political environment from her perspective as an Aboriginal woman, mother and activist. 
Each work plays on a double entendre based on typically European interpretations of words, though uses colour to counter that European meaning. 
Skin-on-Skin is a well-known practise for first contact between Western babies & their mother’s at birth; though Konstantina has exacerbated the colours of the most iconic skin tones in the world and has used them to tell a different story altogether in her contemporary dot-painting piece. This is just one example of the work included in this exhibition. 

SUNSHINE & LOLLIPOPS
Australia’s history has an increasingly forgotten past of cultural genocide that was exacerbated by the volume of Original Nations people moved into camps called Missions. These missions were run by white, religion based colonisers to breed out the black, the language and the culture of our people. These missions still existed into the 1960’s and were a root cause of The Stolen Generation and institutional multi-generational trauma up until very recently.                                                          
It is well documented in many books and even in the Missions own newsletter publications titled “Our Aim” (readily available online to read and wonder) that children were treated as ‘attractions’ to busloads of white God-fearing and church going parishioners who were encouraged to bring along sweets such as boiled lollies and lollipops ‘spoil the native children’.    
             
But as we all know, it wasn’t all Sunshine and Lollipops in those places.