Part of this year’s Sydney Festival, Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist Thea Anamara Perkins produces her largest artwork to date at Sydney’s Carriageworks.

Thea Anamara Perkins, Stockwoman, 2022, Carriageworks. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist, N.Smith Gallery, and Carriageworks.
Raised and based in Sydney with family ties to the Redfern community, Perkins uses her family’s photographic archive as source material. Stockwoman brings the artist’s great-grandmother and Arrernte elder, Hetty Perkins, to the forefront of the composition.
The mural is handpainted in response to the national myth of Ned Kelly. However, in Stockwoman, the younger Perkins reimagines a First Nations matriarch as the truest representation of a strong and daring spirit; one who, from fourteen, worked riding horses and branding cattle in the gold mining settlement of Arltunga, 110km east of Mparntwe (Alice Springs).

Thea Anamara Perkins, Stockwoman, 2022, Carriageworks. Photograph: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist, N.Smith Gallery, Sydney and Carriageworks, Sydney
Created onsite over three weeks, Perkins reveals, “Stockwoman is about exploring the strong matriarchal line of my family through my great-grandmother Hetty Perkins, and in doing so questions the figures in Australian history that we choose to mythologise. As a First Nations person, I began considering who my heroes are versus those often upheld in our popular imagination, such as Ned Kelly.
Nana Hetty is a big source of strength in our family and has always been an important figure for us. There were a range of forces that she was negotiating: the state, the church, the grave and present danger of being on the frontier, while also providing care to nine children and being a pillar of the community. These are the figures that we should be celebrating. It should be these strong First Nations matriarchs who are at the forefront of the Australian collective imagination.”
Carriageworks
14 December 2022 to 12 February 2023
Sydney