When Boneta-Marie Mabo discovered Queensland's Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act 1865, which allowed Indigenous children to be sent to industrial schools on the ground of 'neglect'—with simply being Aboriginal constituting proof of neglect, it crystallised 15 years of observations she had made working in the criminal justice system.
Mabo, a Nywaigi, Meriam and Manbarra woman and granddaughter of land rights activist Eddie Koiki Mabo, had witnessed what she calls a clear pipeline between child protection and incarceration for First Nations girls. Her artwork, titled Colonial Threads, responds to this historical law by examining its ongoing legacy.
FUTURE COUNTRY, the second iteration of the Country Road and NGV First Nations Commissions, invites artists to look to the future while simultaneously acknowledging the past. The Country Road and NGV First Nations Commissions is a national, biennial mentorship and exhibition program that supports emerging Australian First Nations artists and designers, bringing together eight emerging creatives with leading industry mentors. The exhibition opens at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia on 20 March.
Mabo's mentorship came from Megan Cope of the Queensland collective ProppaNOW. Through their collaboration, Mabo developed a work that moves beyond literal representation. The selected artists respond to the exhibition's key themes of ancestral memory, truth-telling, restorying, and future-making. The resulting installation uses 238 hand-made ragdolls, crafted with her mother and aunt, each representing a year of colonisation. The dolls spill from a white-painted cot beneath a mobile embroidered with words such as 'care' and 'justice'.
From Melbourne, Brook Andrew mentors Jahkarli Romanis, a Pitta Pitta artist working with photography. Romanis has created a six-by-nine-metre photograph of her ancestral lands in north-western Queensland, captured in reflection through the waters of the spectacular system of rivers and wetlands known as Channel Country. Her great-grandmother was stolen and sent to Palm Island; the archive of photographs at the South Australian Museum became her only link to that ancestor.
From Nipaluna/Hobart, Nunami Sculthorpe-Green creates ceramic sculptures of marina shells, endangered by ocean warming and pollution. The works collectively convey the strength and breadth of contemporary Australian First Nations art and design practice across the country. Marina shells have been central to Tasmanian Aboriginal culture for generations. By using ceramics rather than real shells, Sculthorpe-Green highlights the fragility of a practice threatened by environmental change.
For many First Nations people, the concept of intergenerational knowledge transfer is at the heart of how we live our lives, and for artists, mentoring is a way of giving back, respecting the knowledge of those who have come before and making space for those who will come afterwards. The mentorship model deliberately structures this knowledge sharing within a national framework.
All works produced through the program will enter the NGV Collection following the exhibition, expanding the gallery's representation of contemporary First Nations art. This ensures that emerging artists' voices become part of a permanent institutional record of Australia's artistic dialogue with its own history.
For a fuller list of artists and mentors, and to learn more about the exhibition, visit the NGV's dedicated Future Country page.