麻豆直播

The exhibition title invokes the legal fiction of terra nullius 鈥� the doctrine used by British colonisers to claim Australia as 鈥渘obody鈥檚 land,鈥� 鈥� denying the existence of Aboriginal societies with complex laws, cultures, and custodianship of Country. For Aboriginal Australians, terra nullius sanctioned dispossession, cultural erasure, and generations of structural injustice. Pease employs the term ironically, exposing its violence and absurdity through layered painterly interventions.

Drawing from museum archives and 19th-century colonial landscape painting, Pease reworks images that once framed Western Australia as empty and available for settlement. He overlays these scenes with assertive Noongar iconography, including concentric circles referencing campsites and waterholes, alongside motifs of land divisions and 鈥渢argets鈥� that evoke the imposition of colonial and post-colonial systems of land use, control and violence. Through these layered interventions, Indigenous presence is visually reinscribed into landscapes from which it was deliberately erased, asserting Noongar sovereignty and cultural continuity. Several recent works extend this critique, drawing powerful parallels between Australia鈥檚 colonial legacy and contemporary struggles for land and justice, including those unfolding in Palestine.

At the heart of Pease鈥檚 practice is a dialogue between Western art traditions and Indigenous storytelling, memory, and Country. His visual language juxtaposes European conventions of landscape and figurative painting with Indigenous iconography and narrative structures, creating layered compositions that reveal overlapping histories and multiple ways of knowing.

Recurring themes across Pease鈥檚 work include reclamation of Country, social justice and land use, as well as Noongar identity and resilience. By placing traditional ways of life, native flora and fauna, and ancestral beings in conversation with colonial perspectives, Pease highlights both tensions and continuities between different cultural systems, emphasising the persistence and adaptability of Indigenous knowledge and presence.

Christopher Pease: Terra Nullius transforms a doctrine of denial into a powerful statement of survival, sovereignty, and the enduring connection of Noongar people to Country, asserting Indigenous stories and cultural authority within landscapes long shaped by colonial narratives.

The Artist

Water is the Ngoorp (blood) of the land that feeds the Koort (heart). The Boodjar (land) is the body, and the body cannot live without blood. If blood cannot flow to one part of the body it will die. If the blood is poisoned the body will die.

聽– Christopher Pease

Christopher Pease (born鈥�1969) is a critically acclaimed Noongar artist of Minang/Wardandi/Bibbulmun descent from south鈥憌est Western Australia. His visual language is deeply rooted in both traditional Indigenous knowledge systems and the history of Western figurative oil painting, particularly 19th鈥慶entury techniques. Drawing on extensive research of colonial archives and historical imagery, Pease interrogates the visual and cultural legacies of colonisation, exploring themes of land ownership, sovereignty, social justice, identity and resilience, while emphasising the enduring connection of Noongar people to Country.

He lives and works in Dunsborough, WA, and continues to expand his practice through exhibitions, commissions, and collaborations.

Header image credits: The Whalers, Christopher Pease, image courtesy artist.