| Although I
have been working since 1970 as an artist and an art teacher,
I guess I hadn’t thought about where the sources were
for me. And those sources I discovered in 1992, when I went
to Tasmania to complete post-grad at the university there.
I thought I was going down with a very large topic of what
happens in our environment on this eastern seaboard, how grand
and pretentious is that?
The other lovely bit was that within two hours/three hours
of arriving in Tasmania, staying with a fellow that was going
to be my tutor and his partner, I nutted out 22 years of my
life. Just like that. And the imagery was actually there,
and I find that very hard to come to terms with - where’s
it being stored, why is it actually there? They dealt with
the Vietnam Veteran, Barry that I’m married to and have
been for the last 33 years. I actually didn’t realise
I could ‘claim’ any of that and I thought well
maybe, I didn’t matter. I knew I mattered but I didn’t
think I had a voice to say things about it. So that’s
where the post-grad went, I produced computer generated, photographic
etchings.
The other surprising part was that when I was doing this,
a very strange connectedness that artists have in the world,
appeared through a show that had been curated and started
in Chicago in the US with two fellows - both were Veterans
but one is a Veteran who now lives in NSW. They had curated
a show called ‘Dog Tags’, which included Vietnamese
artists and Australian soldiers who weren’t artists
but wanted to put some voice to how they had been feeling.
It was a groundbreaking work and artists like Ray Beattie,
who produced a piece of work that we all associate now with
imagery of Vietnam - the Australian flag folded and the army
coat over the back of a chair.
I produced these 22 pieces of work, one for each year that
I had been married to Barry, I did them quietly. But then
the War Memorial, after seeing it in the ‘Dog Tag’
show in the last venue in Brisbane, bought the whole exhibition.
It started me realising how much of a voice I actually had
and how much I could speak to the women who were like me,
very few of them were artists. I found very little written
in Australia in 1992 by any woman, whether it was American
or Australian. Later there were, and there have been major
articles and books published by Australian women. It is surprising
when you think Australia actually had the first women war
artists. They were in the First World War, and the Second
World War – we’re a little illustrious group.
So along the parallel with my artistic life has actually been
this other social conscience life if you like to say, that’s
tied in with my artwork. And I think, “Oh, I’ve
finished with it now,” but that’s never the case.
The cast pieces of clothing that we had done, and the excerpts
from the men’s letters that are now all housed in the
War Memorial - they have meaning. And they still have meaning,
and they’ll always maintain that particular meaning.
Jen McDuff, 2004.
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