To mark the opening of PICA’s exhibition In Her Footsteps: A Tribute to Matrilineal Legacy, exhibiting artists Lauren Burrow, Tom Freeman and Zali Morgan spoke about their work and the exhibition’s themes with Clothilde Bullen, Manager, Art, Culture and Collections, Edith Cowan University. Hear more about the artists’ works in this excerpt of their conversation.
[Clothilde Bullen] Now, Zali we’re going to begin with you. Can you tell the audience a little bit about Fanny Balbuk and why she was the focus for your work in the exhibition?
[Zali Morgan] Fanny Balbuk was born during colonisation during the Swan River colony and her track ran from Matagarup or Heirrison Island to where we’re situated here today at PICA. The whole Perth CBD used to be wetlands and so I was very drawn to telling the story of the degradation of the wetlands and how the country’s changing or has changed. If you’ve seen the work, the middle textile was the first textile that I created and that was the actual map that was sent back to England. It had the wetlands on it and then had really specifically the blocks of Perth drawn over the top of it. It was such a strong image for me that I was just like…crap! It was so blunt and this is what is happening, and this is what has happened. And so researching into that and then talking about Fanny’s track from there, how she just walked through gates and walked through houses and was one of the first Noongar freedom fighters. She was such a strong woman in that era of the height of colonisation to then, what does that story look like now when we walk that track. Even though the wetlands aren’t here physically, they’re always going to be here, and no matter how the country changes the track will still be here.
[CB] Yeah. And we we’ll talk a little bit later about what she meant for Aboriginal people, what she’s meant to us in terms of this image of the grandmother, the matriarch of particularly Noongar country and we’ll talk a bit about that later. I think really important to think about in the context of the kind of mapping that you’ve done as well.
Before we go on to that, Lauren, I just want to ask you a little bit about your work. So, you did the Anne Gordon Visual Arts Samstag Scholarship and you looked at some scrap materials and investigated connections between urban and rural landscapes between the individual and the collective, the social and ecological. With this exhibition, the work that focuses on Val Plummer’s experiences. And I was so interested to hear you talk about the wax and the bike. I feel like you should tell people about the bike and how it was made. What prompted you to make those investigations and make that connection?
[Lauren Burrow] So, Val Plumwood is someone whose archive I’ve been involved for the past several years, I’m on the committee that manages the archive and she’s someone who I’ve spoken to Hannah about before. This exhibition seemed like a really great opportunity to directly focus on her. I’m interested in her for a number of reasons, but one of the things that I’ve wanted to talk about with this show is a very particular moment in her biography which was her survival of a saltwater crocodile attack in Kakadu in the 1980s. She went on to write an essay about that experience as a moment of radical philosophical transformation for her. She specifically speaks about this experience of being death-rolled by the crocodile and having a kind of a revelatory experience in the moment of that rolling and she describes it as a centrifuge of whirling blackness that she kind of comes out on the other side of that really changes her perspective on her role within the food chain and ecosystem. And then so I wanted to think about that space of the role as a sculptural space of transformation. I’ve been thinking about the centrifuge, which is also a machine used to casting in sculpture, and I decided to make the centrifuge myself and it seemed like the easiest way to do that was to get a washing machine which has a centrifuge itself. And so I got a washing machine off Facebook Marketplace and rigged it up to a bicycle and attached the bike to the back of the washing machine and spent the week leading up to this exhibition opening in the space here, pouring molten beeswax into casts that were in the washing machine drum. So those are the artworks upstairs that you can see in the show.
[CB] We’ve had some conversations especially about the bike and the kind of panic through churning, churning churning. When I was thinking about the work the first things that I was thinking about was this sort of liminal space, and it’s something mothers often talk about, for example beforehand so before giving birth and then through that afterwards and those are two different people and that’s in between you. I’m a mother of teenagers at the moment. So, I am also dying a little death. But that in between moment is this kind of weird space that part of you or even your full self dies and another person’s reborn. And so, to me that with the centrifusion, the turning and that space between life and death was really interesting, inviting that to…it’s sort of motherhood and the maternal drive, I guess.
[LB] Yeah, that’s really interesting. And I think that in the way she talks about it which I think is totally related to what you’re saying is it’s a moment of really reckoning with her former sense of being an individuated self and kind of like becoming so radically inseparable from everything.
[CB] Lots to talk about there. But Tom, let’s talk a little bit about your practice and the impetus behind your works in the exhibition, which is so lovely by the way, and for me, you focused on the language of your mother and the memory of the moments where she became your mother and you became her son are also remembered through others, and I found that really interesting. Can we talk a little bit about that?
[Tom Freeman] So the works that I’ve got in the show, it’s a mix of a new painting that I did and then a couple of older works that are close to 20 years old and they’re all my interpretation of looking at memories and my relationship with my mum and the emotions that are attached to that relationship. Essentially, fondness, like it’s about idolising her and appreciating her role and that sort of thing. But it’s all coming from me and whatever my emotion is about that.
The two older works up there, which there’s a smaller painting of my grandmother giving birth to my mum and then a series of pencil portraits on tracing paper of an old photo of my mum, that morph and change as they’re made up. And so yeah, happened to kind of fit the bill when Hannah spoke to me about this show and I was really pleased because I was going through a lot of old stuff in that studio and it just felt good to be able to use some old stuff that still felt valuable to me and I’ve never shown them before so it was really nice to do that. But because they have been made so long ago, this drive to make them and the ideas around them were quite distant and the new work that I was making was partly trying to tap into what my approach was at that time, it was a lot about the emotion of memory and nostalgia and looking at histories and the way things change and blur over time. So the new painting that I did there, which is a large white painting, it was looking at that idea, but from a different visual approach and really just simplifying the way that an action will change as it’s repeated or as if a movement is happening, it changes inevitably, and so the way that memory just shifts.
[CB] I mean, with that new work for me, what struck me was that whilst immediately you think it’s linear because it’s lines, actually the way it functions is not linear because it’s about memory and memory changes and it circles around and it changes depending on who’s telling the story about the memory. And I feel like that work was trying to capture that with that kind of being relevant to that work?
[TF] All those ideas around stories and stuff and as I was making this work, and then even having done it, and I’ve just been thinking about it further. There’s this idea that I had been talking about as stories that I’d heard or things that have been told to me, or that my siblings might have said, or different things like that. But then also the idea of stories, I feel like in my family, we don’t necessarily have stories, whereas other people might talk about stories and storytelling and stuff like that. I feel like my understanding of that was quite different, and it’s more in my head. It’s not like this whole thing of like, OK, this is the story, this is passed down or handed over, just sort of the way that information and ideas are in my head and where they’ve come from and how they’re communicated or transmitted. And they are constantly changing.
[CB] Because you could do that painting five different times and probably come up with similar but five different responses or outcomes. One thing that really struck me about all of the works, I don’t know if it’s something that you’ve noticed yourself, but this this kind of ritualistic feeling about the work that definitely is in yours but even Zali yours with the sewing, the working through country, or using a centrifuge to turn, turn, turn, there’s this real ritualistic thing about this and I think in terms of matrilineally, and stories – when we tell stories about our mothers, our grandmothers, the great women in in history, women and not just mothers. Because we’re not just talking about motherhood. We’re talking about matrilineally so that can be grandparents, it can be carers, it can be aunties, it can be all sorts of people. Those great women, that ritualistic retelling of story, it’s really important to have an exhibition like this because that’s really critical to think about and to talk about. Was that something that like when you were making work, did you think about that sort of thing? That’s kind of open to everyone really.
[TF] For me I was particularly conscious of being a man in this show and this show all about the significance of women and the power of women. I was just conscious of my approach being specifically about me and heavily acknowledging obviously the significance of women, for me and in society but not trying to speak for any women. And so that’s why it was very directly from me, of me. It was lovely on the opening here to kind of see all the connections, not just in the show that we’re in, but in the other works in the whole of PICA.
[LB] Just on what you were saying about the importance of returning to the story and retelling and I think that’s really relevant when it comes to Val Plumwood. On the one hand, she’s very well known in certain academic scenes. But she also has in the last decade, younger generation of artists and other thinkers outside the Academy have been really drawn to her work. Because she was saying things in the 70s, in terms of her environmental philosophy about the urgencies and changes in terms of our practices in this country, in terms of forest conservation and those kinds of things that are still super relevant today. And so, for me, I think it’s like revisiting her at work is looking at how prescient it was and how important that still is and how it’s work that has been done before. And it’s really important to acknowledge really amazing work that has been done before to be able to develop it without having to start from scratch.
[CB] I feel like there’s a kind of continuous call and response to that. And Zali, particularly around Fanny Balbuk, so many Aboriginal stories, but so many stories about women in history, have to come through oral story because we have been written out of many, many books. We’re not even in the first place, so much of that stuff have to come from oral history, if you’re looking at midwifery, if you’re looking at doctors, or you’re looking at people passing on knowledge through shared experiences and they’re speaking, and showing, which is a very different thing. And that is definitely the case with your work, Zali.
[ZM] I think when I was making the work, I was really conscious of trying to tell this story of Country and ancestor and in doing that and making sure that all the practices I was using were low tox or the rust dyeing process of using found metal and vinegar to dye the works and then drawing on the fact that the Southwest has such high iron content in the soil – even the indigo is a low tox indigo and the cyanotype element – cyanotype is the only photographic process that is low tox and all of these elements. But then going back to what you were saying about Fanny Balbuk and oral histories is that Daisy Bates is one of the only people that ever wrote about Fanny Balbuk – a white anthropologist, a woman, one of the only women anthropologists in her time, and even though she was white she was even being told to be quiet, that this isn’t the space for you. But her power and the privilege that she did have meant that Fanny’s story was able to be continued to be told, even though whatever you think about Daisy Bates – I feel that was a really important part of Fanny’s story.
[CB] And I think it is a really interesting part of it because in so many ways, I mean we do know that the word for man is Noongar. It has been misused because it was male anthropologists who came here and who only went to men and went what’s the word that we should use? And they said ‘Noongar’, because it was a man talking to a man, so it could be very different had it all been female anthropologists or you know, that story might have changed a lot, but it did change with Daisy Bates. And it is very interesting to think about the way that Fanny Balbuk was talked about in the Western Gazette, which is what the West Australian was before it was owned by 7 Media. The Western Gazette was pretty brutal towards her at the time and talk about the fact that she was not behaving politely as a woman, she was literally walking through gates and houses and up to Parliament, things like that. So, these stories are really important to continue to be told.
Tom, I wanted to talk to you about that beautiful, beautiful portrait, which is installed so beautifully as well as from a curator’s perspective. It’s a little jewel. I really love it, but it really spoke to me personally about the ways in which we perceive our mothers, so never really getting quite the full picture of them, often not until we have children ourselves or we become our mothers’ carers. I wanted to ask you what you were reflecting upon when you created that particular work because it’s quite different from the other ones.
[TF] It was done quite a long time ago and it was drawn from a photo of my mum in her 20s and there was something about the visual aesthetic of the set of photos that were in that family household and were of that time, and the way that both my parents looked, the way that that the landscape looked and that everything looked – there was something about that, that I kept going back to that. Yeah, I guess the idea of this work is that it’s just some drawings that I found in my studio when we were thinking about this show and it had never come to anything or been anything but I pulled it out and yeah, I suppose figured out what I wanted to do with it for this show. The idea of being able to repeat an action draw the same face from the same photo over and over, but it changes all the time and just that sense of…there’s so many layers of people and then when you add time to that as well, there’s so many aspects. Coming closest to finishing this show I’ve been talking to my sister a lot and the writing that’s on the wall up there, there’s a bit of writing that she did 10 years ago, and I was chatting to her a lot about each of our memories and family stuff, just that thing about whatever my perception of my mum or anybody, I suppose at any time, is, it’s such a miniscule part of the person and you can never really know all the aspects of everybody and in that relationship that the child to a parent is one thing and then like you say, it’s, for me looking at it now is very different, having become a parent and thinking about as a parent for a child with all those different things it’s so many aspects.
[CB] It’s holding a lot that work and holding a wide variety – it’s not just you looking at her, but it seems like she is looking back across many many things. I was thinking about matrilineality when I was thinking about these questions, and it seems to me that it plays out really differently with all of your works. But there’s that common thread, obviously. Like Tom, yours seems very direct but Zali and Lauren it’s really interesting to me that you chose someone who is a mother to many Noongar people from a long time ago and Lauren you’ve talked about Val Plumwood, who becomes this kind of Mother Earth figure in terms of her position towards ecological sustainability and things like that. I just wanted to ask about that and whether that was in your head, whether that was really conscious or, you wanted to deliberately to speak to that.
[LB] Like as in in the philosopher as mother figure?
[CB] Well, the Mother Earth figure because she was really concerned with the environment and she literally came head-to-head with the environment.
[LB] She wrote a lot about, the figure of Mother Earth in her work and she was pretty critical at some of the ways that femininity can be reduced to nature in a way. If femininity and nature are things that are being devalued in relation to a supremacist patriarchal whiteness. And so that’s a really interesting term to think about in relation to her. I also do think that her work is a kind of like a guide. She’s kind of like a guidebook or something, and it’s educational and maybe I’m interested to think about what that means in relation to matrilineality. How do we like, we’re critical of the terms around gender and the environment, and matrilineally like through what I’ve got from her actually.
[CB] The term Mother Earth, well certainly in the past it’s quite passive, you know. It’s like there’s no assertiveness there, the earth is having stuff done to it. And we know certainly in many cultures that actually, that’s not the case. It is a much more complex relationship. She spoke of that didn’t she?
[LB] Yeah, totally. And it depends. Like if there’s an attitude towards something like nature or woman, that figures, I guess, that entity as something that is ripe for exploitation basically. That’s the kind of thing that she was working against – is how do we actually have a relationship to something like nature or women that is accountable and emphasises the dependencies of everything in those systems. I’m talking about ecology here and that is about honouring those dependencies rather than instrumentalising the best resources.
[CB] I mean, Zali you’ve obviously talked about Fanny Balbuk about in your work, but I was interested in, what you know for you, as someone who’s a young person looking back on history, looking at older women and female elders in community. I mean, what is it about that that you lean on and lean to to actually draw on in your work but also in your life as well?
[ZM] Yeah. I guess in the work, Fanny, she she wasn’t a mum. She didn’t have kids. She only had seven husbands.
[CB] I think she killed one of them and she sent herself away. She put herself in isolation. And then came back and it was all fine. Which frankly, I wish that was still available to us now. I’m joking…my husband’s lovely.
[LB] Which husband?
[ZM] Interesting thinking about that, but also, maybe not her as a mother, but her mother and her grandmother in how the work speaks to that. One of the works is a linoprint and it is of Government House and that’s where Fanny’s grandmother was buried. Then there is another work that is of the Swan Brewery which is a birthing site, but Fanny wasn’t born at this birthing site. When colonisation happened and they blew up the sand bridge that Noongar people used to cross through, women started birthing at Matagarup which is actually a men’s site, so what did that do to that and there was all these interesting intersections, not necessarily in Fanny’s life but how Fanny came about through these women. And working with Aunty Geri Hayden, who I’ve worked with quite a lot on different projects over the past couple of years. And she’s always talking about about Fanny Balbuk and getting to work with her on the written aspect of it and having her input into my work was really an important part of that. And it was such a privilege. There’s been a few other people who have been really emotional about my work and other Aboriginal senior women in my life and so that has been really validating. Making sure that I’m telling the story the right way because it’s such an important story that has such an untold aspect to it that you want to tell it the right way.
[CB] And I can see that notion of matrilineally is absolutely not lost on you. And you’re an incredibly conscious practitioner always in curatorial and as an artist, and I think you consciously think of those things all the time, don’t you? In those links to aunties and grandmothers and your own mum and sister as well. I was gonna ask you because one of the hanging works, the textiles, I had a look around at the back of them and I saw that you can see through textile, you can see the tracks on the other side, but the back of it’s left quite unfinished and loose, so you still see these tracks going through, but they’re kind of disrupted . It struck me sort of symbolically, that it was referencing unfinished business on Noongar Country which is really interesting. I wanted to ask about that, because if we’re talking about women’s tracks, there’s a lot of unfinished business.
[ZM] Yeah, when I was making the work it wasn’t necessarily about that. It was more about that in these maps the waterways specifically are so contained for this area and on both sides of the river there’s walls to stop it flooding and things like that. Whereas traditionally it would have been a moving body of water that would have had tides and beautiful beaches and all of these really important parts of being a body of water, so it’s important to show that. In the cyanotype, it’s specifically not like that because that is how well, it’s all this blue colour to show you that continually and that change, rather than being contained to these spaces, which the map was then showing, that this is where the water is and you know, there was even one that was like a square. And I have never seen a natural square lake in my life. But then I get unfinished business is quite an interesting aspect in terms of planning and I have such a vivid image of her storming down those streets and walking with her stick. It’s always like with her stick. And there’s a beautiful statue of her down at Government House in a really colonial dress. It’s just all of these layers of who people want Fanny to be, but actually she’s just a warrior.
[CB] One final thing that I really noticed? And not just in your work Tom, because really it is in everyone’s, it’s that you’re talking about the memory, you’re talking about nostalgia. Is that something that’s really important in terms of framing matrilineality? Is that something that’s critical to the way that we think about it, or was it not deliberate, or was it just because it’s part of your practice or can we talk a little bit about that? Because I think memory and nostalgia play heavily into the way that we see women and mothers and carers. There is that stereotype of the grandmother. How does that function within your practices?
[TF] I don’t see it sort of links directly to that as the concept or more broadly for me, this feels much more of a personal approach. Initially my thoughts around the idea of nostalgia is this emotional wave that kind of hits you, trying to reach that emotion and it’s not quite getting there but it’s using that as a force of an idea, to find it, to make something and to connect with myself and to try and then think of how a viewer can connect to their own feeling. I guess for me, I just kind of use that approach in my own direct way.
[CB] I mean, they’re incredibly tender works, that’s probably the word that I would use to describe them. They feel really tender and nostalgia is filled with tenderness. I think typically when we’re talking about or when we thinking and feeling about things that have meant something to us, or even things that we’ve imagined as part of our history that someone else was talking about, I feel like that really comes through in your work.
Lauren, what about you? Just memory. I mean, so much of it is obviously due to you going through the archives of Val Plumwood, but I can really see it in your practice as well.
[LB] The term nostalgia is really interesting. It’s not one that I had thought about in relation to the work but I think that there is something about the intimacy and what it is to engage with a life of someone who has come before you? In the case of this work, someone that I never met or never knew personally yet I feel so intimately connected to? I’m really interested in way that a life becomes dispersed through objects and materials. And that’s the way that I have become intimate with this person is through spending time in her house and reading her words, and so going back to this idea of dispersed selfhood or obliterated selfhood, is really interesting to think about in the way that carries through objects and what it is to pick those objects up and have some sort of a meaningful relationship with them, and share that with others through a work as well.
[CB] I mean, it’s almost secondhand nostalgia in a way, there isn’t a direct relationship, but the way that you’ve found that is through some of those items because that washing machine, for example, immediately conjures up the sense of nostalgia about its use and why people use it through the ages and all those sorts of things. So, I think it’s very present in the work and you have been able to cut through by using those objects to do that. That’s been really interesting.
[ZM] I think it’s the same. You know, this idea of this person who I never met, yet has gone before me, and many Noongar women have gone before me. I guess, just trying to imagine what she was feeling and what she was going through. And then pairing all of that back into the work is quite a lot, but thinking about all the other women that have gone before me and who has carried on her legacy and her story.
[CB] The very essence of matrilineally, so thank you, that’s a nice thought to end on.
Images: Zali Morgan, Boorloo Bidi 2023, installation view, In Her Footsteps, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell. Image: In her Footsteps panel, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Olivia Pizzale-Bryce. Image: Zali Morgan,Boorloo Bidi (detail) 2023, In Her Footsteps, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell. Image: Tom Freeman, installation view,In Her Footsteps, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell. Image: Lauren Burrow, Pressure on the rim of surface running over it 2025, In Her Footsteps, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell. Image: In her Footsteps panel, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Olivia Pizzale-Bryce. Image: Lauren Burrow, Pressure on the rim of surface running over it 2025, In Her Footsteps, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell.
