‘By making works of art from different positions of identity I am taking part in reigniting, reinvigorating and reimagining Queer-Aboriginal knowledge against the conventional ways in which colonisation has denied, repressed, and muted non-heterosexual ways of being, knowing and doing Aboriginality’ – Troy-Anthony Baylis (Baylis, T; Queerly Speaking, Artlink, Vol 32 #2, 2012, p98).
Born in Sydney in 1976, Troy-Anthony Baylis is a painter, textile artist, installation artist and performance artist. A descendant of the Jawoyn Aboriginal people from the Katherine region in the Northern Territory, Baylis grew up in country towns in New South Wales and Queensland prior to moving to Brisbane in 1989. Since 2000 he has lived and worked in Adelaide.
Baylis’s multi-faceted artistic practice is founded in the process of ‘queering’ and unsettling traditional ways of representing Aboriginality. Troy-Anthony Baylis’s vibrant practice is emotional, politically provocative, visually arresting, and deeply personal. Baylis has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally, having exhibited and performed across New Zealand, the Philippines, Iceland and Germany.
Troy-Anthony Baylis holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (HONS) (1997) and a Bachelor of Education (Secondary) (2000), from the Queensland University of Technology in addition to a Graduate Certificate in Arts Management (2001), from the University of South Australia. In 2013 Baylis was undertaking a PhD at the South Australian School of Art. Baylis’ PhD thesis is titled ‘Deadly Mimicry: Indigeneity and Drag in Contemporary Artistic Representation.’
Troy-Anthony Baylis’s work is informed by his multi-layered identity, and whilst he cites his Indigeneity and sexuality as important parts of his work and his identity, Baylis states that being representational of his generation is of the utmost importance to him (Nicholls, C; An Extension To Love, Asian Art News, January/February 2008, p67).
Baylis cites Rothko and Gilbert and George as being particularly influential on his practice and their impact can be seen in the artist’s bold use of colour and highly political performative happenings. Connections have also been drawn between Baylis’s ‘Emotional Sunsets’ and Andy Warhol’s vibrant 1972 sunset multiples. Works such as those contained in Baylis’ Emotional Landscape series reveal the influence of prolific romantic-fiction author Barbara Cartland on the artist’s practice, addressing emotional experiences of love and lust.
In its bold assertion of identity, Drag performances offer Baylis a vehicle for sexual, social and political liberation. As Baylis states: ‘[I] want to use drag to liberate myself both personally and culturally from repression and conservatism’ (Nicholls, 2008, p71).
Troy-Anthony Baylis cites Australian pop icon Kylie Minogue as a major inspiration to his Kaboobie alter ego. Baylis’s playful, drag performances under the guise of larger-than life personas such as Kaboobie are at once satirical and celebratory; in employing mimicry, witty humour and parody, his drag routines become ‘performative critiques of contemporary sexual politics and reality’ (Nicholls, 2008, p70). Beyond inspiration for the tongue-in-cheek drag persona, Baylis is a self-described ‘kylieminologist’, with a constantly evolving Kylie Minogue collection, which he has exhibited on occasion (Nicholls, 2008, p69).
In 2009 Baylis created the digital collage series Making Camp. In these works Baylis intrudes upon the colonial landscapes of Glover, Johnstone and Martens, playfully imposing his drag persona along with photographs of works from his ‘(pink) Poles’ series onto the works. Speaking as Kaboobie, when discussing this series, Baylis states ‘I am reconquering – decolonizing – using the ‘master’s’ tools (Lorde, 1984) to draw attention to the idea that art too has played its part in the practice of cultural genocide. I Kaboobie… am using my live body as a tool – a weapon of choice to transform the paintings into my own new world.’ (Baylis, T; My Body the Hand Grenade: Kaboobie’s making camp, Social Alternatives, Vol 30 #2, 2011, p6). In its juxtaposition of historically and culturally disparate elements, Making Camp embodies Baylis’s practice of queering history, a declaration of the artist’s desire to re-write preconceptions of Aboriginality. As he states: ‘My body, the hand grenade, is a passport to inhabit multiple spaces. The explosion will cast glamorous contents into the air and makeover the cosmos’ (Baylis, T; Queerly Speaking, Artlink, Vol 32 #2, 2012, p99).
Baylis cites early experiences knitting with his grandmothers and mother as being influential in his practice. Simultaneously tributary and subversive, Baylis’s knittings ‘destablise the legacy of knitting as a domestic and gendered occupation’ (Baylis, T; 2012, p98).
Baylis’s Postcard series (2010-11) are artefacts representing private dialogues between geographically dispersed networks of ‘sistas’. The objects are reconstructed from Glomesh and other upcycled artificial fabrics. Baylis likens the ‘high-ceremony’ of the cross-cultural ‘Postcard’ exchange to the 19th/20th century colonial practice of adorning respected Aboriginal peoples with symbolic ‘breastplates’ denoting status and honour.
The twenty-seven embroidered dilly-bags present in Baylis’s Tomorrow series (2009) allow for a deeper understanding of Troy-Anthony Baylis’s practice. His reinterpretation of traditional Indigenous forms, embroidered with lyrics from the 1977 song ‘Tomorrow’ – a song which is anthemic in it’s proclamation of hope – is both poetic and profound, and points to both the artist’s sense of humour and the eternal optimism present in his work.
The knitted forms present in both the Postcard and Tomorrow series, when considered along with the artist’s (pink) Poles body of work – in which Baylis reimagines traditional Indigenous burial poles as colourfully knitted objects – reflects Baylis’s process of queering or destablising traditional representations of Indigenous culture to construct new meanings and to imbue the objects with a new emotional significance.
Indeed, beyond his drag performances of Kaboobie and co. much of Baylis’s oeuvre embodies a performative approach. This is true of the repetition of visual elements in works such as his painted Emotional Landscapes series (in which X’s, representing kisses, are scrawled line-after-line across the surface), as well as the knitted forms present in Postcard, Tomorrow or the (pink) Poles series (if we regard the act of knitting as a type of performance). In enacting these performative engagements both with and through his work, Troy-Anthony Baylis finds a deeply personal and emotionally charged mode of connecting with his own unique identity and unsettles traditionally held cultural perceptions.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2013
- Last updated:
- 2013
