So fine. Contemporary Australian women artists make history

While in Canberra for the Australian Historical Association conference in July, I visited the National Portrait Gallery and stumbled upon this exhibition that engages with Australia’s past. To celebrate the National Portrait Gallery’s twentieth birthday, its curators, Sarah Engledow and Christine Clark, invited ten women artists to create new work that responds to aspects of Australian history. The choice of subject matter each artist has made; the place, person or event from Australia’s past each has chosen to re-interpret speaks to their personal histories and values, and to broader questions of Australian identity and culture. Many of the works engage with similar themes – family, migration, dislocation, scientific representation and the presence of the past in the present, and these issues reflect the approaches to Australia’s past that many historians are currently taking.