Christopher Pease

Born 1969 in Boorloo (Perth)⁠, Whadjuk Noongar Country, Australia
Lives and works in Dunsborough (Quedjinup), Wardandi Country, Australia
Minang, Wardandi, Bibbulmun

UNSW Galleries

Balga Resin #3, 2023
canvas, hessian and balga resin
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney
Courtesy the artist and Gallerysmith, Melbourne

Balga trees have been an important resource in Australia’s First Nations economy. The fronds were used to thatch shelters for the Noongar people of Western Australia, the pulp pulled from its trunk healed upset stomachs, its tall flower burned for hours as a torch, and when it began to decay, the tree would offer up a feast of delicious bardi grubs as a final parting gift. For lifetimes the Noongar people have used the tree’s resin as a glue to bind together hunting weapons or walking sticks, tan leather, and waterproof cloaks. Christopher Pease uses balga resin to render rich and glistening works of art.

A Minang/Wardandi/Bibbulmun man, Pease’s work usually combines Western-style figurative oil painting with traditional Indigenous storytelling to interrogate contemporary life and the loss of Indigenous land and culture. In this work, relying instead on the metaphorical resonance of the balga, Pease melts the resin onto a hessian surface to create an abstracted landscape the colour of blood and soil, which also evokes and subverts European art history tropes. Shifting with the light, the canvas is at once a memorial to, and celebration of, the adaptability and endurance of Indigenous knowledge and economies over millennia.

Christopher Pease is a Minang/Wardandi/Bibbulmun man from Western Australia whose visual language is at once deeply embedded within the Western history of oil painting and traditional Indigenous storytelling. Western notions of home and land ownership are referenced throughout Pease’s vocabulary of visual metaphor juxtaposed with his own iconography of place. Through meticulous research of archive materials, Pease draws from historical imagery by first settlers to examine the intersection between Indigenous and Western culture in Nyoongar Country. 

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.