Decorative ceiling appropriates a ship’s outer edge

Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Australian South Sea Islander, Australia b.1982 / Copper Archipelago 2024 / Copper, resin and steel / 50 × 960 × 360cm (approx.) / Commissioned for ‘The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ / Purchased 2024 with funds from Tim Fairfax AC through the QAGOMA Foundation / This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Jasmine Togo-Brisby

Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Australian South Sea Islander, Australia b.1982 / Copper Archipelago 2024 / Copper, resin and steel / 50 × 960 × 360cm (approx.) / Commissioned for ‘The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ / Purchased 2024 with funds from Tim Fairfax AC through the QAGOMA Foundation / This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Jasmine Togo-Brisby / View full image

Brisbane-based Jasmine Togo-Brisby is a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander whose research-driven practice examines the historical practice of ‘blackbirding’, which is a romanticised colloquialism for the Pacific slave trade.

Copper Archipelago 2024 was created as a site-specific installation for 'The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art'. In the work, the artist affirms her maternal lineage to 'Granny' (her great-great-grandmother) who was kidnapped from Vanuatu at the age of eight and enslaved as a house servant in 1899 for the Sydney-based Wunderlich family, renowned for the manufacture of pressed-tin ceiling panels.

Watch | Jasmine Togo-Brisby introduces Copper Archipelago 2024

By bringing this familiar kind of decorative ceiling, which viewers may associate with their own home, together with the arresting form of a ship’s outer edge, Togo-Brisby speaks to her own feeling for ships as a 'homeland' for her dislocated and dispersed people. The artist appropriates patterns usually found on Wunderlich ceilings and adds a vernacular of charged motifs that speak to her family’s history, including relief portraits of her mother, daughter and self. Shiny Wunderlich copper tiles frame each portrait, creating a dazzling effect — inspired by Pacific peoples who were lured onto slave boats with bright trinkets.

Installed in a relatively confined gallery space, Copper Archipelago requires you to look up to experience the work. This act replicates that of Pacific peoples enslaved in the holds of ships on three-month journeys across the Pacific, where they had no choice but to lie down, looking up at the underside of the deck.

Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Australian South Sea Islander, Australia b.1982 / Copper Archipelago 2024 / Copper, resin and steel / 50 × 960 × 360cm (approx.) / Commissioned for ‘The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ / Purchased 2024 with funds from Tim Fairfax AC through the QAGOMA Foundation / This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Jasmine Togo-Brisby

Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Australian South Sea Islander, Australia b.1982 / Copper Archipelago 2024 / Copper, resin and steel / 50 × 960 × 360cm (approx.) / Commissioned for ‘The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ / Purchased 2024 with funds from Tim Fairfax AC through the QAGOMA Foundation / This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Jasmine Togo-Brisby / View full image

Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Australian South Sea Islander, Australia b.1982 / Copper Archipelago 2024 / Copper, resin and steel / 50 × 960 × 360cm (approx.) / Commissioned for ‘The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ / Purchased 2024 with funds from Tim Fairfax AC through the QAGOMA Foundation / This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Jasmine Togo-Brisby

Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Australian South Sea Islander, Australia b.1982 / Copper Archipelago 2024 / Copper, resin and steel / 50 × 960 × 360cm (approx.) / Commissioned for ‘The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ / Purchased 2024 with funds from Tim Fairfax AC through the QAGOMA Foundation / This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Jasmine Togo-Brisby / View full image

Edited extract from the publication The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, 2024

Asia Pacific Triennial
30 November 2024 – 27 April 2025
Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
Brisbane, Australia
Free entry

Asia Pacific Triennial Extended
View this work at GOMA until 13 July

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