Fiona Foley is one of Australia’s leading aboriginal contemporary artists. She is a political activist, a curator and a writer. Her work is controversial, provoking, and all but bland. She was born in 1964 in mainland Australia, at a time where aborigine people had no say in the society in which they lived. She studied Art and Education in Sydney, Australia, and at St. Martins School of Arts in London.
The title for her exhibition at the October Gallery in Bloomsbury, ’Strange Fruit’ comes from a poem written by Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allan (1938), that Billie Holiday later turned into one of her most famous and classic songs. The poem was inspired by Lawrence Beitler’s 1930 photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana and was used to help change the racist terror that prevailed in the Southern states of the USA until the 1960s.
I met with Foley at the October Gallery where we were surrounded by her provoking work. We sat at a table in the middle of the gallery, she was a very pleasant and welcoming person. Maybe not what one would expect of a contemporary artist, none of the crazy hair cut, or strange fashion sense. She was just an average looking lady with sad eyes and a warrior spirit.
Big City Redneck: When did you first decide to become an artist and what made you become an artist?
Fiona Foley: I think my aboriginal family, my great uncle and great auntie inspired me to become an artist when I was growing up as a child.
BCR: When did you first realise that you wanted to do this full time?
FF: When I was in high school I majored in Art and I went from there straight into Art school. I started to realised that I became an artist very focused on the work that I was doing and probably a little bit ambitious, and thought that if I just worked hard I could have a career in the Arts.
BCR: You where born in the mainland Australia, and considering the political situation did you go to a mixed school and if so, how was it?
FF: I went to school on Hervey Bay. The school was mixed, and those memories are also memories of racist taunts on the way to school and from
