Native women of South India

Three of the images in this series, including the one of the artist posed as Lakshmi, the goddess of plenty, are based on images by the famous Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906; first prize winner at the Vienna Art exhibition 1873, and a symbol of India’s adaptation of Western painting conventions). Another image references the colonial British obsession with ethnographic documentation, specifically an infamous project of a series of photographs of aborigines of the Andaman Islands by Maurice Vidal Portman c.1893 in which natives were placed against a black and white checked background to facilitate anthropometrical measuring. The original series (in the British Library) reflects anthropological studies in the nineteenth century when there developed an obsession with the rigid examination of the physical characteristics of racial distinctions in the subcontinent.

Asian Art Department, AGNSW, April 2010.