Julie Gough

Born 1965, Melbourne, Australia

Julie Gough's allegorical assemblages work principally to subvert the historical misrepresentations of Aboriginal peoples – both generic and particular – which have become reified or stereotyped in the popular mind. A worldly and scholarly adventurer whose walkabouts rival Boy's Own, Gough took up art after a near–fatal but inspirational collision with a huge eagle, while riding pillion in outback, north Western Australia.

Her method – enhanced by earlier studies in pre–history and English – is to critically rework the assumed meanings of historical stories and cultural forms, and in the retelling, present these as beguiling deconstructions, visually enriched by a well–judged fondness for found bric–a–brac and kitsch ephemera.

Gough, sensitively attuned by her own cross–cultural credentials, builds her narratives sleuth–like from garnerings of eavesdroppings, absences and peripheral vision, taking care to not trespass, but determined also "to dislodge the evidence no–one thought to remove, or even knew was there".

Ross Wolfe from the 1997 Samstag catalogue, Elephant Poo
 
1997 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
1997 MA in Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London
1997 Master of Fine Arts (Research), Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia
1994 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Honours, Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia
1993 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Curtin University of Technology, Perth
1986 Bachelor of Arts, (Prehistory, Anthropology and English Literature), University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia 

Artist's website
http://juliegough.wordpress.com/