Artist Statement, Essays and Publications by Mathieu Gallois
Artist Statement
Displacement / Belonging
As an artist, architect and researcher, Mathieu Gallois’ practice explores social and material alienation and displacement, and their antithesis: place / belonging. Gallois’ practice falls into three main periods of cultural production.
Furniture design / making and drawing:
In this early period Gallois developed his skills as a designer and a multi-skilled artisan. In 1991, Gallois spent a year at the Hobart School of Art, consolidating his drawings skills, focusing on portraiture.
1993 – 2006 – Art making:
Ephemeral and sometimes site-specific, Gallois’ art making from this period often appropriated and interpreted existing structures on a one-to-one scale. Within these recognisable frameworks, slippages or shifts in material and spatial reality were introduced creating environments that were both familiar and alien: a house is made from polystyrene in the art work Frontier (1998). A film-set in its entirety is painted in Blue Screen Chroma Key – a special effects paint used in film to create a void background in the art work Flesh Hunger (2001). And a detention camp is experienced in repetition in the art work Containment (2006).
The art works of this period concurrently expressed a sense of alienation, critiquing situations or structures that contribute to socio-environmental ruptures, or a lost cultural / spiritual sense of belonging to, or identification with place. For example, Flight 934-B (2000) documented the passengers of a 747 transcontinental flight suspended between destinations; Caravan (2001) created a narrative around an invisible constituent who lives on the fringes of society; and Containment (2006) explored the psychology of the Australian Federal Government’s policy of long-term detention of “unlawful non-citizens”.
In 2002 Gallois received a Samstag Scholarship, which enabled him to complete a Masters Degree at Goldsmiths College in London, UK.
2007 – An expanded practice entailing architecture and research; resulting in collaborative, speculative, activist propositions:
Upon returning from Europe, several major developments broadened the scope of Gallois’ creative practice. Between 2004-7, Gallois completed a degree in architecture at UTS. Starting in 2005, Gallois made a conscious decision to turn the direction of his practice inwards (so to speak) and engaged Australian Indigenous history and culture (culminating in his PhD). Since 2005, Gallois’ practice has located itself more firmly between art and architecture, has been more socially and environmentally engaged, and has been characterised – in process – by research and long-term collaborations.
Recent collaborative, speculative ‘activist’ works include The Reincarnated McMansion (2008-), 1 House = 1000 Homes (2009) and the Wellington projects (2010-13).
The Reincarnated McMansion project proposes to audit, dismantle and rebuild a single McMansion dwelling. An unsustainable large home will be reincarnated into two or three best practice, zero emission smaller green homes using the existing McMansion building materials.
Conceived as a speculative housing project, 1 House = 1000 Homes invited six international community groups and NGOs to submit housing proposals that could be funded through the sale of a single Australian home.
The Wellington Projects consisted of a publication and a series of research-based interpretive artworks. Country, Spirit and Belonging: The Wiradjuri in Wellington Valley is a 64-page newspaper-styled ‘book’ featuring contributions by and perspectives on the local Aboriginal community as a gesture toward writing their narratives back into the recorded history of the area (central NSW).
Between 2014-2018, Gallois completed his award-winning PhD on the Aboriginal Flag, and completed his first major solo architectural project, the Hill Street commission.
The Aboriginal Flag book. 2024.
The Aboriginal Flag has witnessed the unfolding dramas, small and large, private and public of Australian race relations. In this, the lead has no speaking parts but is in every scene as advocate, witness and symbol of Indigenous people’s long-standing struggles for a Voice, Constitutional Recognition and a Treaty with the Australian state.
Across these histories, The Aboriginal Flag’s acute symbolism has afforded it a multiplicity of meanings and associations. It describes in the first instance, the relationship of people to land, land to culture, and culture to identity – the premises of Indigenous ontology and Indigenous land rights. The flag affirms with equal resolution Blak pride, Aboriginal self-determination, Indigenous sovereignty and the repudiation of the insidious policies and cultures of assimilation.
These rich associations traverse and inform understandings of Indigenous activism and politics, Australian multicultural society, contrasting Western and Indigenous notions of ownership and sovereignty, and the critical, yet poorly understood role of visual art in Indigenous activism.
They also traverse the Flag’s unique, conflicted and changing statuses. Conceived in 1971, the Aboriginal Flag in 1997 became the only flag in the world, to represent a people, that was owned and monetised by an individual. One day short of Invasion Day 2022, the flag’s Aboriginal owner and creator Harold Thomas sold the flag’s rights to the commonwealth of Australia for $13.5 million. The once free and revolutionary Aboriginal Flag is now in the eyes of many, the colonised Australian Aboriginal Flag.
From these perspectives, this book transcends its topic – the Aboriginal Flag – and acts more broadly as a vehicle for understanding the complex political and personal entanglements of contemporary Australian society. These entanglements reveal a stunted, nascent nation struggling or unable to overcome its racist foundations; and a universal human story of creative resilience, illumination, acclaim, fortune, greed and betrayal.
Aboriginal Flag PhD. 2017.
The Aboriginal Flag has three conceptualising foundations: art, activism and social change…. They give form and structure to the flag’s histories and meanings that in their totality form a cohesive reading of the Aboriginal Flag that is whole and distinctly Indigenous.
The Aboriginal Flag as Art. 2016. Australian Aboriginal Studies Journal. AIATSIS Aboriginal Studies Press. Issue 2.
Is the Aboriginal Flag art? And, if it is, what end does that argument serve? Art is not a helpful noun; certainly it is a risky one on which to base an argument. Yet, to fail to read the Aboriginal Flag as art or, more precisely, to fail to read it as Indigenous activist art, is to fail to understand the Aboriginal Flag and, more broadly, the role of culture in Indigenous activism post colonisation.
Country, Spirit and Belonging: The Wiradjuri in Wellington Valley. 2012. Selected chapters
Country, Spirit and Belonging: The Wiradjuri in Wellington Valley is a sixty four page newspaper–styled publication featuring contributions by and perspectives on the local Aboriginal community as a gesture toward writing their narratives back into the recorded history of the area.
Native Born. 2001.
In Southern Victoria, on the Mornington peninsula, where I spent my holidays at my parent’s hobby farm, the colonising settler farmers, first deforested the landscape to fuel Melbourne's early settlement and subsequently set about remodelling the peninsula to resemble a homogeneous western 'environment' loosely modelled on the Welsh countryside. Today 'New' Mornington Peninsula is a hybrid of rolling green fields careful articulated by pine and cypress trees, orchards, cattle and horse studs in the style of the old country, and reclaimed native bush land. The local community is divided by opposing campaigns, one seeking to 'Save the Pine Trees' and the associated (perceived) western heritage of the peninsula, while others are determined to reintroduce native fauna and flora.
Polystyrene. 2001.
Polystyrene defies easy definition. Held up to the light in sheet form it is surprisingly translucent and empty looking - the surface dissolves into the whole. Reaching into a bag of polystyrene balls is a little uncanny – the seemingly weightless balls both evade one’s grasp and, with a little static electricity, ‘stick’ to one’s skin!