Julie Dowling’s new exhibition Eegarra Beearaba (To Arise from Sorrow) is an exhibition of powerful singular portraits and celebratory icons centering on the meaning of the National apology to the stolen generations.
It is also a comment on what the apology meant to her own family and her community both in Perth and her traditional country in the Central West of Western Australia One of the portraits depicts Julie’s grandmother Mary Dowling who was taken away from her mother and placed in an orphanage where she was trained as a washer woman. She is shown hanging out bed sheets, with a nun supervising her. An intelligent woman who would have loved to fulfill her own dreams but was not allowed to because of the colour of her skin.
