Caroline Vercoe - Indigenous Art and Pacific Cosmologies

Lesson part of the course Decolonised History of Art: Global Narratives from 1900 to the Present. Click here for the programme and the full course.

This lesson examines artistic production across Australia and the broader Pacific, focusing on how Indigenous artists have used visual forms to maintain connections to land, ancestry, and cosmologies while responding to colonial histories and contemporary geopolitical conditions. Art as storytelling, place making and ancestral connection is explored through the work of artists including Rover Thomas and Emily Kam Kngwarray, whose work integrates painting practices that blend abstract and symbolic representations, to convey ancestral narratives, cultural knowledge, and the spiritual significance of country and place. Performance artists Latai Taumoepeau, Angela Tiatia, and Kalisolaite ‘Uhila who explore similar concerns, will show how contrasting art practices also foreground these concerns, while also highlighting the crucial relationships between people, their communities and the environment. The lesson situates these practices, alongside artists Tracey Moffatt, Lisa Reihana and Tony Albert, within transnational dialogues, highlighting how Indigenous artists negotiate the intersections of heritage, identity and global art networks, while challenging dominant frameworks of history, colonialism, and visual representation.

Caroline Vercoe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Actively involved in teaching, curating, and researching, she specializes in contemporary Pacific art and performance, with a particular focus on issues of race, gender, and representation.