Figure 2 (Melbourne Cricket Ground)

Scarlett is a Wadaurrung woman temporarily living and working on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. She spent the first ten years of her life off Country and grappled with the balance between her Aboriginality and identity within the larger National settler narrative alongside her European ancestry. Now having access to her Country and the tangible connection that it offers she has begun to use art to navigate the ways that history and identity has formed herself and the places she now engages with.

In the Past(s)
This work encapsulates what Place means to the artist and how she understands Place in return. Scarlett has used copies of historical paintings and lithographs of well known locations within Naarm which hold their colonial narrative and existence and subsequently the mold in which First Nations people exist within. The layered presentation of two pasts represents the story which has built this city today and their importance to how we interact with these spaces. The overlay of ‘what was there before’ also holds the yearning of the artist in accessing parts of the past permanently lost or traumatised by colonisation. The images used as a place marker in Figure 1 is of the corner of Elizabeth Street and Flinders Lane in 1864. And Figure 2 is an early portrait of the Melbourne Cricket Ground both holding such significance to Kulin people since time immemorial.