Salote Tawale is the inaugural recipient of the Michela & Adrian Fini Artist Fellowship, awarded by the Sheila Foundation.

I don’t see colour presents a new body of work by Salote Tawale, the starting point for which is a conversation that took place between the artist and a philosophy student at a party in the UK. Presenting painting, installation and video, “I don’t see colour” is a response to this exchange and an attempt to process the implications of this statement in the face of the unevenly felt impacts of climate change brought on by colonial and capitalist structures. The artist imagines climate change as an indiscriminate force that doesn’t see colour either.

Salote Tawale’s expansive practice explores the inherent conflict of being a Fijian Australian, a heritage that simultaneously includes and excludes Tawale from a dominant post-colonial Australia. Employing photography, video, drawing, sculpture, installation and live actions, Tawale re-forms and performs her identity and experience of a translocated Indigeneity, that is, removed from land and separated from traditional practices and consequently repositioned within immigrant histories.