About the Artist: Jasmine Togo-Brisby

Abstract

About the Artist:Jasmine Togo-Brisby Katerina Teaiwa Jasmine Togo-Brisby is a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander with roots in Ambae and Santo, Vanuatu, and now based in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her practice is multidisciplinary, including painting, early photographic techniques, and sculpture, and her research examines the historical practice of blackbirding, a euphemism for the Pacific slave trade, in which over sixty thousand Islanders were taken to work on Australian sugarcane plantations between 1847 and 1903. This labor trade has a contemporary legacy, continuing to impact those who trace their roots to Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia through the South Sea Islander and other slave diasporas. Togo-Brisby, whose great-great-grandparents were taken from a beach in Vanuatu in 1899 and put to work as house slaves for the Sydney-based Wunderlich family, is one of the few Pacific artists exploring cultural memory and shared histories of plantation colonization and displacement across the Pacific. Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Nadai Wilson Ships, displacements, arrivals, and belonging are regular themes in Togo-Brisby's powerful works. She is deeply inspired by her ancestors' difficult stories and experiences, as well as by what she needs to share with her daughter, who features in her artworks. In a 2020 interview for the New Zealand Maritime Museum, titled "Unfurling Tākiri with Jasmine Togo-Brisby," she spoke on the importance of identity within a community still marginalized in mainstream Australia: "What does it mean to be South Sea for me? Like, it's everything, you know. It's my culture. It's my people. It's why I exist." Jasmine Togo-Brisby is the first artist of Australian South Sea Islander heritage to be featured in The Contemporary Pacific, and we hope that awareness and inclusion of Australian South Sea Islanders as an integral part of Australian and Pacific histories and families will continue to gain attention and establish the recognition and justice these communities deserve. [End Page vii] Click for larger view View full resolution Bitter Sweet, by Jasmine Togo-Brisby, 2015. Unrefined sugar and resin, dimensions variable; installation 2,000 x 2,000 x 1,200 mm. Photo by Shaun Waugh. Racial segregation was heavily enforced in Australia throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Respectful burial of non-white people within cemeteries was often difficult to facilitate, and many plantation owners opted to dig large burial pits on the outskirts of their plantations. Today, mass unmarked graves of South Sea Islanders remain scattered across plantations throughout Queensland and northern New South Wales. Often dug up by accident, each discovery reopens wounds from a past that most Australians would rather forget. This work exists as a memorial to those who did not survive the journey on slave ships, to those who passed away through lack of immunity to Western diseases, and to those who endured the toil and burden of hard labor only to be left out of Australian history books. [End Page viii] Click for larger view View full resolution Into Something Else, by Jasmine Togo-Brisby, 2021. Crow feathers and mixed media, diameter 2,500 mm. Photo by Bo Wong. South Sea Islander erasure was initially pathed through mass deportations (the largest in Australian history), and those remaining were forced by governmental structures to identify their South Sea bodies as Indigenous Australian, a terrain of "Blak" political struggle that continues to reinforce South Sea placelessness today. Into Something Else interrogates this spatial dilemma and acts as a physical manifestation of the Pacific slave diaspora—exploring the complexities of contemporary South Sea Islander identity. The black crow is often claimed by our South Sea community and used in unity as a symbol of the blackbirding trade and of our collective memory and cultural identity. My practice takes shape using reoccurring motifs, and in this piece, I claim crow products as my own South Sea material culture. The installation moves both backward and forward in time, refusing to sit in either the past or the future, while offering itself as a site of South Sea possibility. [End Page ix] Click for larger view View full resolution Post-Plantation, by...