Melbourne artist Jo Scicluna is primarily motivated by her experience as a first generation Australian and the cultural displacement she associates with this experience. She explores landscape as a signifier of place, belonging and a longing to belong. Sculptural gestures are applied to photographic works, as a means to mark and modify the territory she feels culturally estranged from, making it her own.

In this suite of works, Scicluna explores the spatial potential of the collage, and ‘alternate’ landscapes are generated through this sculptural process of cutting, removing, obscuring and conflating viewpoints. She offers landscapes that are both familiar and surprising, encouraging a reflection on what is seen, what is obscured and what is imagined.

Where We Come From draws on the diversity of the community that frequent the Bargoonga Nganjin building. It is an inclusive title that invites the viewer to consider who the ‘we’ might be. It is also a title that alludes to the properties of matter that define our collective origin. 

Scicluna’s use of circular forms and voids in her photo-sculptural works and vinyl applications on glass, draw upon and activate the specific architectural features and characteristics that define the Bargoonga Nganjin space.

Image: Jo Scicluna, Where We Come From #2, 2016 archival inkjet on cotton rag, acrylic, Victorian ash timber, 60 x 45cm (detail). Photography: Christo Crocker

The art wall at Bargoonga Nganjin is one of a number of public art initiatives whereby Council brings art into the everyday; we curate a changing exhibition program at Fitzroy, Carlton and Richmond libraries.