Individualising Indigenous History: Julie Dowling’s Imagined Portraits

This paper examines the way Julie Dowling’s imagined portraits of Aboriginal people employ traditional portrait conventions to create powerful, emotive individual portraits that aim to individualise indigenous history. Imagining faces of her ancestors and influential Aboriginal freedom fighters, Dowling seeks to apotheosise figures from Aboriginal history, giving them heroic stature through portraiture. Drawing on Ernst Gombrich’s seminal essay, ‘The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and Art’ (1972), I argue that Dowling manages to create an impression of life that makes her portraits accessible and affective to a broad audience. Dowling is a Badimaya Aboriginal artist based in Western Australia whose art confronts assimilation, dispossession, native title issues as well as racial discrimination. Her work reflects a personal and political drive to connect with her Aboriginal heritage. Many of her imagined portraits are of family members, as well as significant Aboriginal figures. In this paper I will analyse four of Julie Dowling’s imagined portraits. Each portrait highlights a different facet of her imagined portraiture.