NAVA Artist File: r e a

r e a: My name is r e a.
I'm an artist who comes from the Gamilaraay Birpai
and Weilwan people in New South Wales
and my practice is positioned within
a very, kind of, diverse interdisciplinary practice
that's research-based.

HOW DID YOU GET STARTED AND MAINTAIN YOUR PRACTICE?
r e a: My mother always saw something in me as a kid
and encouraged it in a way that was about creativity.
That is, no one else in my family are creative in that way.
But I realised, when I went to art school,
that there were two things that she saw.
One, was I was this kid
that was quite isolated from the rest of the family.
And two, it was a time in our history
where artists like Albert Namatjira were really, really important
in terms of visual identity of Aboriginality
for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.
And she always used to tell people
that I was gonna grow up to be a painter like Albert Namatjira
and of course, I can't paint at all,
and not in the way I really wanted to paint,
which is why photography became the foundation of my practice
and led me into digital processes.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CHALLENGES YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED IN YOUR CAREER?
r e a: I think the first thing about the challenges in my practice
is, you know, ending up at art school,
which I never, ever thought I'd get to,
and arriving there knowing that the desire to paint
was a collision, in collision with the construction of Aboriginality.
And for me, I was so lucky that
new technologies came into its own at that time
because it gave me a way,
a different direction where I could actually find a space
where I could just be r e a.
It did give me time, during that period in my practice,
to step aside and be even more invisible, in some sense,
because not only in the context of this traditional, European kind of medium
that was defining my practice,
I was also trying to find ways to feel comfortable
within my own gender, my own sexuality.
And that in itself is in collision with who I am
as an Indigenous person.
So there were all these kind of elements.
And it was, you know, 1993 when I was just finishing my undergrad
and the first text that came out,
which really is still the seminal text in this country,
was Marcia Langton's
'Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television'.
You know, that was it,
and even though there are many more, you know,
academics these days, Indigenous and non-Indigenous,
who are approaching, you know,
writing in the fine arts around Indigenous works
or how every Indigenous artist want to be framed,
it's still taken the generation that I've kind of come from
to now start to output their work through their thesis
and to position themself in the context
of their own kind of practice and history,
which, in turn, will be part of the Australian history landscape.