Jasmine Togo-Brisby

Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s artistic practice traverses a range of techniques from photography and filmmaking to sculpture, bringing to light Australia’s dark history of plantation colonisation. Through her wide-ranging practice, Togo-Brisby insistently declares the specificity of her cultural identity as an Australian South Sea Islander, making apparent the contemporary legacy of this dark chapter in Australia’s history.

The nineteenth century practice of “blackbirding,” as it has euphemistically become known, consisted of the widespread  removal – through both coercion and force – of Indigenous peoples across the Pacific, to provide labour for the newly-established sugar plantations in Queensland. Between 1847 and 1904 this practice led to the displacement and enslavement of roughly 62,000 documented people – in addition to an unknown number of those who remain undocumented. This legacy has stayed largely absent from the pages of history, removed by numerous acts of erasure: from mass deportations in the wake of the Pacific Islander Labourers Act in 1901, to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s 2020 declaration that there had been “no slavery” in Australia. As Togo-Brisby says, “The weight of history presses our voices down.”

Among those who traversed the Pacific, stowed in the bellies of ships like freight, were Togo-Brisby’s great-great-grandparents. And passed down through their familial lines, from one voice to the next, one body to another, is a weight of history which continues to be felt in the present, and which will not be silenced. 

This lived inheritance is made evident in much of Togo-Brisby’s work. Take, for example, the 2017 work Kanaka women in the sugarcane: Hambledon plantation, a composite photograph in which many of her central concerns are evident. The image depicts a line of women, standing on the fringe of a crop of sugar cane, receding diagonally back into the picture plane. The upper portion of the photograph is largely burnt out, and high contrast renders much of the remaining detail difficult to decipher precisely. However, there is something jarring about the woman standing in the photograph’s foreground, her back to the sugar cane, her face tilted slightly upwards. Togo-Brisby has inserted herself into the archival image, enlarging the historical photograph to life-size and then photographing herself within it. She is, she explains, “Re-appropriating the archive, inserting the contemporary moment into our readings of history.” This image situates Togo-Brisby as the ancestor of these nameless women, while simultaneously collapsing the contemporary moment into the historical. More than an assertion of presence, it as assertion of the present – of the continued impact perpetuated by the legacy of plantation colonial violence. This temporal collapse is heightened by the choice of collodion on glass as photographic medium, its distinctive appearance synonymous with the period in which the original image would have been made, when its use was at its most widespread. 

Sugar functions as more than subject in Togo-Brisby’s practice. She has also utilised it as medium, to powerful effect. In Bitter Sweet, 2016, unrefined sugar, combined with resin, becomes sculptural medium. Created in response to the discovery of an unmarked mass grave on the grounds of a former sugar plantation, Bitter Sweet presents a pile of skulls cast in sugar, conflating the commodification of sugar with the commodification of the people who were taken, traded and enslaved in order to produce it. The use of sugar as medium works on this metaphoric level, its sickly-sweet aroma dramatically heightening the horror of the subject matter. The incorporation of smell works in another, more visceral manner, operating phenomenologically in order to bypass cognition and detachment. Our senses are neither rational nor coolly dispassionate, and the provocation of a sensual response brings us, as viewers, back to our own bodies. Bodies which are intentionally situated as bearing witness to a painful legacy which remains largely invisible. 

The archive plays a central role in the process of making this legacy visible. Togo-Brisby explains: “Archives drive much of my arts practice, and our collective South Sea Islander experience. Locating material evidence of our people’s existence is an ongoing struggle.” Historically, the bodies of Australian South Sea Islanders have been archived in order to be documented: distinguishing features have been recorded, they have been photographed and fingerprinted. These are the archives to which South Sea Islanders turn to trace their origins: the paper trail of a people commodified and exchanged. We reconstruct histories through these archives, but for Togo-Brisby this archival consultation “is not researching, it’s searching.” Here, bodies have been archived. But these bodies and those of their descendants are themselves archives, physical repositories of oral histories that are lived and felt and embodied. It is the histories parsed from these archives that Togo-Brisby’s work enlivens. 

Through this laborious “searching” process, Togo-Brisby recently discovered that her great-great-grandparents had been acquired as house servants in 1899, by the Wunderlich family in Sydney. The Wunderlich company is most widely known for the production of elaborate architectural elements, many of which remain in buildings across Australia and New Zealand. At the time Togo-Brisby discovered this connection, a number of Wunderlich ceiling panels were undergoing restoration in Wellington Town Hall. Here, in the city in which she lived – an ocean away from the country in which she was born, oceans further from the islands from which her ancestors were taken – was a trace of the family who ‘owned’ her family. 

Her recent solo exhibition Dear Mrs Wunderlich (Page Galleries, Wellington, July–August 2020) was made in direct response to this discovery, continuing a body of work first explored in if these walls could talk, they’d tell you my name, 2019-20, made for the Courtenay Place lightboxes in Wellington. Here, Togo-Brisby brings two strands of historical preservation into direct communication with each other, challenging the belief systems which bestow value upon the traces of some histories, while negating others. Layering images of ornate Wunderlich ceiling panels with posed silhouettes of her mother, daughter and herself, Togo-Brisby overlays one physical history with another. The ornate ceiling tile is considered a valuable historical remnant, worthy of preservation and restoration. What, then, of the people who have emerged from the gaps in that history – where is their preservation, their restoration?

Togo-Brisby’s most recent work, the multimedia installation Into Something Else, commissioned for the exhibition nyinalanginy / the gathering at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (February–April 2021), marks a shift in her practice. Less concerned with exposition, the work forges a material grounding that is distinctly of and for the South Sea Islander community. “It’s an inherent part of our South Sea identity and experience to explain who we are, but I’m going to stop making work which helps others understand us. Descriptions and evidence are not a form of liberation for us,” she says. Freed from the burden of explanation, Into Something Else presents a swirling oceanic vortex crafted from the spines and barbs of thousands of crow feathers. As black feathers glisten silver in the light, a journey which began with blackbirding is transformed and reclaimed. Pulsing and spiralling inwards, the work’s textural surface is an oceanic site of liminality and renewal, of  “South Sea possibility.”  

This essay was originally published in Artist Profile, Issue 55, 2021.

EXHIBITION
Whetūrangitia/Made As Stars
3 September 2022 – 19 February 2023
The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt