THEA ANAMARA PERKINS
It’s been a couple of big years for Thea Anamara Perkins, the Sydney-based artist with a seasoned CV that warrants ditching the descriptor ‘emerging’. She’s already plumed her cap with feathers of distinction, claiming a second short-listing in the 2020 Archibald Prize after finalist honours as a first-time entrant in 2019 with a portrait of Christian Thompson. Perkins stripped the self-referential artist of his costume schtick and cast him afloat in sugary pink deserving of his self-described “feminine Virgo moon-rising energy”. She won the Dreaming Award (for a young and emerging artist) in the 2020 First Nations Arts Awards, sharing the Sydney Opera House stage with such illustrious company as curator and artist-activist Djon Mundine OAM, who was honoured with the Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement.
And bragging rights warrant for figuring as a finalist in the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, for scoring inclusion in the 2019 Tarnanthi Festival at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), and for counting among the anointed few granted residency at The Clothing Store Artist Studios in Sydney’s Carriageworks.
But for Perkins, an Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman whose aestheticism seeds between the polarities of Alice Springs and Sydney — the compass points for family — the most meaningful accolade came with the 2020 win of the 41st Alice Prize for her painting Tent Embassy.
Describing a moment of political and personal potency — said by prize jury member and director of the AGSA Rhana Devenport to “convey both familial tenderness and profound historic change in this country” — it is Perkins’ portrait of close family and the face of courage.
“The inspiration for my painting is a treasured family photo of my grandfather Charles Perkins and aunt Rachel Perkins taken during a land rights protest outside Old Parliament House in Canberra,” says the artist of her beloved activist “Pop”, who she remembers as devoting every waking hour to his people. “My grandfather was born at The Bungalow [then the Alice Springs Half-Caste Institution] in Mparntwe. This image is reflective of the way that politics was personal for my grandfather, and that he dedicated his life to the fight for justice for our people.”
Touted as a potential reinvigoration of realism, Tent Embassy with its seemingly solarised forms fulminating in “the colours of 1970s radicalism”, unashamedly pulls from the canon of Western portraiture. “But it’s the beguiling slide into confronting themes,” says Perkins of an “easy-access” portal through which she has taken the rhythms, colours and lush brushstrokes of Central Desert Art. “Portraiture is a really clear way to communicate what I want to say about Aboriginal people… it’s an opportunity to convey the beauty, kindness and love when so much misrepresentation repeats across media.”
Confessing to a mix of art crushes that include Gordon Bennett — “so ahead of his time, the way he broke down the archetypes of Aboriginality,”; Emily Kame Kngwarreye — “she is like my Picasso”; and Caravaggio — “I just love his dramatic chiaroscuro”; Perkins considers the potential of now relative to her art practice.
“It’s interesting, after one discourse dominating, one lens offering to view the world, I feel like we are shifting into a new era,” she says. “I’m actually very excited to be hearing a greater complexity of voices.
“But it doesn’t matter who you are,” she adds of the chaos we are now enduring collectively. “We are all shaken up, disrupted, being made to think deeper about what we want our lives to be and we have this chance right now to change. It just can’t be business as usual into the future.”
@anamara_art edwinacorlette.com