Karla Dickens

Beneath the skim board

Karla Dickens’s collage Beneath the skim board addresses issues of discrimination and racism towards Indigenous communities in Australia through a constellation of historical and current events. Dickens spent over a year collecting and modifying ubiquitous objects into sculptural collages that commemorate former circus performers of Indigenous Australian descent. Assembled from various fabrics, knick-knacks and other materials, these frenetic compositions celebrate the campy glamour of circus performers, but also articulates the hidden mistreatment experienced by the performers, and more broadly, the lives of Indigenous communities in Australia. 

The objects, newspapers, and imagery in Beneath the skim board address the practice of blackface that was historically prevalent and still ongoing in Australia. A significant moment that the artist incorporates is a 2009 episode of the nation’s leading TV variety show Hey Hey It’s Saturday, during which a blackface skit was broadcast. Only visiting US guest Harry Connick Jr. voiced his disapproval by giving the offending act a score of zero. No one else in the cast, crew, or audience that night seemed to be offended, rather objection to this unfeeling practice was seen as an act of over-the-top political correctness. Other elements of this collage speak to the harassment suffered by Dickens from the local KKK branch when her work January 26, Day of Mourning—a repurposed Australian flag embroidered with scores of black crosses of “grief”—won the New South Wales Parliament Art Prize in 2013. January 26 marks the public holiday when Australians celebrate the country’s ‘founding’ defined as the 1788 arrival of the first British fleet ships. However, for most Australian Indigenous people, this date denotes the beginning of colonial dispossession of their lands and the decimation of their former, customary ways of life.