Over the last two years Ohnesorge has directed her focus toward Australian history, particularly the unlikely hero Ned Kelly whose identity was literally obscured from vision by that infamous metal helmet. Kelly’s infamy and the notion of identity hidden through circumstance, triggered Ohnesorge to  consider the overlooked Indigenous heroes widely obscured from our collective history. Ohnesorge became drawn to “two historical figures whose Australian stories of crossing the boundaries of racial division she found inspiring and fascinating,”¹ Bennelong (1764?–1813) of the Wangal people who was savagely introduced to White society and William Buckley (1776 –1856), escaped English convict who lived with indigenous tribes of Victoria for three decades. 

As Ohnesorge describes “Bennelong was forced to accustom to white culture in his own country and later in England. He did so with bravado and an amazing ability to adapt, but ultimately paid a heavy personal price.”² Bennelong under the charge of Governor Arthur Phillip, changed his skins to the tailored garments of the white man, and a stone cottage was built for him on the Eastern Point of Sydney Cove (now named Bennelong Point). In her painting Invasion (The Loss of Liberty) Ohnesorge literally pictures Bennelong’s head as being occupied, his noble profile etched with the silhouette of Europeans rowing ashore from the arriving tall ships. In Trophy (Bennelong) Bennelong’s portrait is crowned with a tall ship, a blurring of vision between foreground and background suggestive of the ornamentation of Bennelong in white man’s clothes as symbolic of a greater disturbance within Bennelong himself. The ship (and all it carries both literally and symbolically) augments and infects the mind of the native, creating a fissure in landscape and identity. 

British convict William Buckley who escaped into the wild during late December 1803, flourishing around Port Phillip Bay is now seen historically as living as a native, a White man who lived as a Black. However, when this wildman was stumbled upon by the Buninyong tribe, they perceived and “addressed him as ‘muurnong guurk (meaning… one whom has been killed and come to life again),”³ as a Black man who had died and returned as a White ghost. In the eyes of these Indigenous Australians, viewing Buckley for the first time, a cataclysmic shift had taken place, not a shift from White to Black, but of Black skin to White. Thirty years after his escape Buckley stumbled back into White society and slowly reintegrated, seen as a symbol of survival and adaptation and viewed with a curiosity akin to that shown towards Bennelong.

The stories of such individuals, torn between worlds are always conundrums of conjecture, observed by outside voices and seldom well documented from the inside. Ohnesorge’s paintings mimic this puzzle, with a discordant visual language oscillating between the familiar and the strange, grounded in intuition and a logic of surprising interventions. Her colour palette is unapologetically bold, rich in neon and anti naturalistic hues, a palpable opposition to the picturesque. Her drawings are layered with myriad textures, recalling the detail of old engravings in Australian Mining, and creating a hallucinatory dot screen matrix in Trophy (Bennelong), disrupting the appearance of the tall ships. Her sculptures are small universes of bilingual conversations merging loaded materials and found objects, both from nature and the manufactured treasure chest of our contemporary disposable culture. Ohnesorge seems drawn to oddness and works intuitively, combining objects that are often kitsch or grotesque in isolation, yet the artist seems to normalise this strangeness, bringing harmony, humour and vitality to create provocative visages. 

Ohnesorge’s large scale figurative sculpture low life presents a character transfigured by material, a hyper-real, candy-pop vision of a wild man in the landscape, the rectangular shape of Kelly’s mask taking over the head, Buckley’s long unkempt beard spilling over the torso. He seems perplexed, scratching his head, vulnerable to the landscape and bound to mortality, abstract paint drips linking the figure and the skull. The small sculpture Invasion mirrors the formal qualities of the painting Invasion (The Loss of Liberty), the glass bell jar a stand-in for Bennelong’s profile again invaded by the arriving tall ship, which towers menacingly over the landscape. These sculptures are experiments in language, reliant on our physical, tactile and cultural associations to colour and object. Whilst at work on a sculpture, Ohnesorge acts as a dilettante anthropologist fine-tuning the organisation of human social and cultural relations, bringing objects into dialogue and freeze-framing the conversation at a sweet spot of rich evocation. 

The native flora and fauna in this series are subject to a state of shifting colour. A brown snake is painted bright green in The Naturalisation of William Buckley, the artist’s colour switching unapparent to the viewer, acting as a silent totem for Buckley’s own new skin. The kookaburra in Australian Mining sits ablaze in bright blue, beside the obscured head of the golden mining figure, the identity of both bird and figure effectively muddied. The obscured head central to the image is an open wound in the landscape. The ornamental butterfly in Trophy (Bennelong), historically collected, catalogued and cased behind glass, forms a counterpart to Bennelong’s own dislocation. 

Ohnesorge’s CHANGING COLOURS presents all the inventiveness and skill that marks her practice as worthy of continued attention.  The artist focuses a window for reflection on Australia’s fraught colonial history and the uncomfortable questions surrounding identity that underpin our blurred sense of nationhood. Bennelong, Ned Kelly, William Buckley and the un-named Indigenous beauties each assume their rightful dignity in Ohnesorge’s fiercely rendered images. Each figure transcends language and circumstance in order to survive, as an admirable likeness, speaking across history and alive with inspiration against struggle and oppression and towards change.

Lionel Bawden, August 2012

1 & 2 Nana Ohnesorge artist statement 2012

3 ‘The Life and Adventures of William Buckley’ by Archibald MacDougall 1852 edited and introduced by Tim Flannery 2002, The Text Publishing Company.