In the hood #8

From her home on Bundjalung country (Lismore, NSW), cross-cultural Wiradjuri woman Karla Dickens works in a wide range of media, unflinchingly interrogating subjects such as race, violence, gender and injustice. To these strong topics she brings an exquisite sensitivity and a black humour in equal measure.
Around the same time she was preparing ‘A Dickensian Circus’ for the Biennale of Sydney (and now in the Gallery’s collection), Dickens was invited, as one of six NSW women artists, to contribute a proposal for a sculptural panel for the Gallery’s historic facade.
Dickens’ winning concept for ‘To see or not see’, included the inkjet print with that title (also now in the collection), and this textile hood, ‘In the hood #8’. Dickens first made it in 2017, part of a suite she crafted from vintage tea towels. Typical of her powerful capacity to stir and unsettle, it disarms through the comforting familiarity of its materials, then draws us in through its playfully performative aspect to consider its possible meanings.
Dickens says her hoods speak of enforced invisibility and act as reminders of some of the worst agonies of recent Aboriginal experience. ‘The work’, she says, ‘is about women and invisibility … the legacy of Aboriginal women today.’ The final commissioned work will be, she adds, ‘important to me, and to my mob from northern New South Wales, to have this chance to speak.’