Megan Cope

Born 1982 on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), Australia
Lives and works in Meanjin (Brisbane), Australia
Ngugi/Noonuccal, Quandamooka Country

UNSW Galleries

After The Flood IIII (ongoing series), 2024–
mixed media
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.
Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

People of the Sand and Sea (Yoolooburrabee), the Quandamooka community have lived in Moreton Bay across the archipelago of islands including Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) for more than 25,000 years.

Disrupting concepts of time and geography, Quandamooka artist Megan Cope works over military maps that recall the myth of terra nullius. Her ongoing series After the Flood weaves social, geographical, and metaphysical stories, reclaiming landscapes with future tide lines of 5-metre sea-level rise, and replacing colonial titles with those of her people’s Jandai language. Each map, glowing with crystalline blue tides, returns cultural layers and memory over landmarks and places renewed with dual histories and a shared sense of place.

An act of decolonial cartography, at a time when entire lands and peoples across the earth are being reconfigured by climate change, with Quandamooka Country itself also vulnerable, Cope’s work is both a remembering of the past, a steadfast endurance of the apocalypse, a reimagining of ocean currents and future islands.

Megan Cope is a Quandamooka artist from Moreton Bay/North Stradbroke Island. Her site-specific sculptural installations, video work, paintings and public art investigate issues relating to colonial histories, environment and mapping practices. Her artistic work is informed by her connections to Community and Country and is committed to revitalisation and continuation of Indigenous cultural knowledges through innovative contemporary art and public art practice.

Cope’s work often resists prescribed notions of Aboriginality and examines psychogeographies that challenge the grand narrative of ‘Australia’ and our sense of time and ownership in a settler colonial state. These explorations result in various material outcomes.

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