The exhibition Past Their Flesh marked a first-time collaboration between Perth-based artists’ Natalie Scholtz and Curtis Taylor. The gathered works, primarily collaborative mixed media paintings on canvas, presented roving yet condensed post-colonial fever dreams, pulling signifiers from a locus of personal-political histories and the settler-state of Western Australia. Past Their Flesh is an encounter with the ever-morphing contours of race, gender, human and non-human beings, an imaging of the messy, fleshy spaces within shifting complexes of identity. While Scholtz has worked primarily as a painter, and Taylor as a filmmaker, multimedia and installation artist, both artists have a knack for working with potent symbols drawn from Australian imaginaries—the visions, desires, projections and containments therein, and the various escape routes that visual art might plot out. Across these works they appear to doubly-condense the embodied self within wider political and relational schemas. What follows is a close reading of several selected works from the exhibition...
 

An emerging history of transcultural engagements in recent years is evident in the growing number of projects by Australian Indigenous artists working with collections held by British cultural institutions. From Judy Watson’s research at the British, Horniman and Science museums in the 1990s, to Daniel Boyd’s residency with the Natural History Museum and projects by Brook Andrew and Julie Gough at the Cambridge Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, these Australian Indigenous artists have negotiated complex histories of colonial collecting practices, contemporary modes of museum display, issues of cultural ownership and repatriation, as well as the role of the artist as a new kind of researcher and interpreter of archives and cultural heritage.