Brook Andrew

18 Lives in Paradise (installation view) 2011
colour photolithographs on folded cardboard
Gift of Brook Andrew and Mabi Andrew through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2020 © the artist
Photographer: Andrew Curtis

Brook Andrew

18 Lives in Paradise (installation view) 2011
colour photolithographs on folded cardboard
Gift of Brook Andrew and Mabi Andrew through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2020 © the artist
Photographer: Andrew Curtis


18 Lives in Paradise


Brook Andrew
First Nations Australian, born Sydney 1970
Language group: Wiradjuri


18 Lives in Paradise 2011
colour photolithographs on folded cardboard
Gift of Brook Andrew and Mabi Andrew through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2020

Artist statement, 2011:

The basic unit used in 18 Lives in Paradise is a cardboard printed box 50.0 x 50.0 x 50.0 cm. The boxes are the building blocks for a sculpture, wall or any other structure.

The box is also a parody of the courier box—those containers daily transported around the globe in the vast movement of lives and identities today. What was thought of as fixed may not be so.

The images are sourced from postcards. The postcards range from the early to mid-twentieth century and form part of a worldwide curiosity in indigenous people, circus acts and personalities, environment, and resources ... The images come together as an assemblage of ‘freaks’ and represent the collision paths of indigenous and non-indigenous cultures; those being documented out of curiosity and those belonging to dominant cultures who have used the land and its people for entertainment and wealth.

18 Lives in Paradise can form a column or wall. It can be a barrier, a beacon or epitaph. En masse, the boxes are a symbol of many lives whose identities are sometimes twisted for the gaze of the curious world.

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Read by a voluntary Geelong Gallery Guide