Context (Display)
Exhibited in 'The Island: A Contemporary Intervention in the Anthropological Archive', 24 June - 1 October 2008, South Lecture Room, MAA.
Event Date 24/6/2008
Author: rachel hand

Context (Analysis)
The Island I & II are based on images from William Blandowski's photographic album, 'Australien in 142 Photographischen' from the Haddon Library University of Cambridge. Only 2 copies of the album are known to exist, the other is in the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin. Early in the twentieth century a set of copy photographs were made and printed and some hundred of these are in MAA's photographic collections. It was these that Brook Andrew saw and was inspired by when he visited MAA in June 2007.
Through the use of colour, and the production of a quasi-painterly surface, Andrew has accentuated the texture, materiality, and the poignancy of and old- indeed an ancestral- printed image.
Blandowski's title was misleading. No doubt he hoped to capitalise on photography's status at the time, as an advanced technology with a unique capacity to represent nature. But the album was made up of photographs of drawings, some of which derived from illustrations in other exploratory works. Many of the images may well be accurate visual records, but others are twice or three times removed from field sketches that were perhaps themselves imaginative, even falsified or fantastic. Hence the corpus possesses an enigmatic status, that Andrew's work literally magnifies, and renders magnificent.
Notes taken from the exhibition guide by Professor Nicholas Thomas, that accompanied the exhibition, The Island: A Contemporary Intervention in the Anthropological archive, 24 June- 1 October 2008, South Lecture Room, MAA.
Event Date 5/9/2013
Author: maa

Description (Physical description)
Blue screen print, mixed media on linen showing an Australian Aboriginal burial, which has been opened, surrounded by trees. Two people, ?indigenous Australians, stand in the trees at the side.
Event Date 5/9/2013
Author: maa