Ryan Presley

Prominently positioned at the National Portrait Gallery’s entrance, Marri Ngarr artist Ryan Presley’s ambitious new commission Paradise won celebrates the strength, survival and autonomy that resides within First Nations peoples through layered storytelling that speaks to history and contemporary experiences. Presley’s work is an invitation to pay witness and hold space for conversations that examine power, perspective and the ongoing residues of the ‘Colonial Project’.

Born in Mparntwe/Alice Springs and living and working in Meanjin/Brisbane, Presley first received acclaim for his series of watercolour paintings, Blood Money, in which he replaced the portraits on Australian banknotes with First Nations culture leaders. After completing his doctorate at Griffith University in 2016, Presley extended this body of work with Blood Money Currency Exchange Terminal, a performative installation which invites audiences to exchange Australian currency for Blood Money Dollars, with the money raised given to First Nations youth organisations.

In Paradise won Presley builds on a form of visual communication he has been working on since 2020, using research-based narratives and power-loaded imagery. In this work he looks to align to the ways religion leveraged artmaking as a teaching tool. Refracting and subverting this, Presley traverses the tensions between the contemporary now and immemorial histories with a finetuned criticality. Presented in a series of large golden archways which refer to Western, religious iconography and signify a sense of worth and majesty, Presley’s beat of heroic First Nations figures engage in acts of resistance, confrontation and escape.

April: What were your foundational steps to becoming a visual artist?

Ryan: We lived with my mum’s parents, my grandparents for long time. I think growing up around my grandpa influenced me to be creative. He immigrated here from Scandinavia in the mid-1960s, and before that he trained as a sculptor in Rome. Grandpa had a job with Holden designing cars. Back then the designs were modelled with handmade processes, and he made large-scale 3D model clay pieces. Art wasn’t stigmatised in my family, so being creative wasn’t something I was ever discouraged from doing. I had some basic ability to draw, and I like drawing, so I was just trying all the time. I kept that up as I got older. Art was one of the subjects I did well in at school, I wanted to be creative, making stuff. I didn’t go to university straight after school. I ended up washing dishes as a kitchen hand. It was a real drag these low-paid high-labour jobs, and I thought ‘there must be something better than this’. An ad in the paper came up for an Indigenous internship program at the Queensland Art Gallery and I thought ‘wow this is something I could probably do!’ I ended up getting one of the roles and it was great, it was like seeing behind the curtain, how the gallery worked. So many people were pursuing their art practice but still working at the gallery as well.

This field is so tricky honestly, it’s like a bottleneck … everyone wants lots of experience but how do you get it when you are building the experience? It’s a strange sort of paradox you have to break through. Sometimes I ask myself ‘am I doing it?’ and yeah I guess I am, I am doing it.

A: I would say you are doing it! What might a day in the studio look like for Ryan Presley?

R: At the minute I’m making work for a solo show, so I walk the dog in the morning and then get in as early as I can to the studio. I work on a painting, work on canvases, then I’m drawing on paper all day. It’s nothing particularly glamorous! There is downtime too sometimes in the studio, if I’m struggling with the idea of something I’ll get into some reading, which helps me I think … you have to use your imagination to understand a concept or a story, to see it. I also like researching things, sometimes I go to the library or look online for something. In this phase, it’s like doodling with ideas and not so much labour-heavy but reading and thinking, playing with different combinations. As an artist, you’ve gotta give that brain a break and give yourself space to rest and come up with something new and push for another day.

A: Can you describe what portraiture means to you?

R: Portraits are a huge part of the human experience; recognising and interpreting faces is one of the most important aspects of our lives. The use of portraits is a defining component of art and history (at least Western art history). I think portraiture is a popular artform because people have such an established knowledge of it, and that recognition and all the related understanding links us to other people. We as social animals need that interface to respond to in our lives.

A: Paradise won features iconic heroic figures who appear as a combination of the ‘everyday’ and the ‘superhuman’. Who are they and what do they represent?

R: The figures in Paradise won are not based on sitters for the most part, they are a kind of everyman and everywoman, so there’s a channelling of variations of people and stories and experiences that I’ve seen personally. This could be people I know, relatives, or people I have met or public stories on historical events.

I wanted to have people from life, from our communities, be represented. I was thinking about the different scenarios and how they affect different age groups and genders in our society. We are all pushing against being disenfranchised.

These figures are aspirational and empowered, emboldened. I like using that religious-based imagery because I’m interested in lived experience and the delicate nature of life. I’m less interested in the comic book element of a novel sort of ‘superhuman’. I like that there is a challenge to life, how illustrating power or the dramatic nature of different experiences has a crossover towards representing mortality. It’s that sort of preciousness … that’s what I was thinking about in these works.

It’s difficult to articulate, but I think it’s about achieving protection for our people in the face of destruction.

I am making visual work that pushes back against that and acknowledges the elements of that, seeking victory in survival. We are overcoming and proceeding through vulnerability, as a way to achieve strength.

A: Research is an essential component of your art practice. How do you represent First Nations histories, perspectives and lived experiences in your artworks?

R: It depends from work to work but they are poetic interpretations of research, things that I find amazing or inspiring. The work with a man standing in front of his car with the dingoes was directly referenced from archival documents of an early colonial figure who recorded how Aboriginal people used dingoes to attack settlers in a coordinated attack. Having grown up with all the conjecture about dingoes – the idea that dingoes are from somewhere else, with questioning around ‘what are they doing here?’ felt like a falsehood compared to this account. Dingoes aren’t just sort of roaming around, they belong. It’s as if they wanted Aboriginal societies across Australia to be attributed to this lack of validation. I look to push back against this.

We do belong. This requires the most basic rules of negotiation, things
like the aeronautics work with the young man in the boomerang gun painting, he is fighting back.

A: When I saw the boomerangs it made me think about David Unaipon (Ngarrindjeri inventor and author) and all of that incredible understanding of design, engineering, technology and aerodynamics and how we don’t credit our First Nations inventors enough.

R: Exactly and things like the boomerang, you could look at it as a simple implement, but this is the genius, the simplicity. A boomerang is so honest and small but really this tool is a complicated physical phenomena. The work is about imagining that further, thinking about the future and what we want our future to look like in this country. Technology is a means to production; we have developed weapons and resistance over time. What does this look and feel like to the old guys, like the man painting with explosive pigments and shooting them up at trespassers of Country. I like that element of the supernatural and melodrama, and that’s why I draw from religious works.

A: Returning to what you were saying about research, I really like that idea of taking settler history and finding those little kernels and then bringing them visibility – from your perspective.

R: It is surprising the amount I found reading those horrible bigoted accounts but if you look between the lines, or even directly at what they write, they’ll brush over things that from my perspective are so important. The irrationality in their perception of reality comes undone when you read these accounts. So often they are accidentally contradicting themselves. It’s such a shame our oral histories can so often be pushed aside, we are just written off. When we cite these sources we can bring the evidence to the conversation.

A: There is a tension of styles and contexts in Paradise won – the medieval arches, the contemporary urban settings and the expansive horizons of Country. How do these components work and clash for you?

R: I suppose the styles align with the research. I am using the European Western language and history, and I can pick out different things and reshape them as part of these works and include them as a collision of colonial projects and enterprises. It can be chaotic and destructive; it is a destructive process, the wreckage, and the thinking around everything that has happened.

In Europe religious image making was the only artform for a time, so the making of the image was a spiritual religious practice. So the religious aspect is linked to that and how image making has developed from there and how I can pull those different threads apart to use less symbolic meanings. Then I am looking to pull apart the Western philosophical fundamentals. There are so many links, like the medieval painting depictions are important to the figures, to link them as a demonstration of something sacred or divine. The function of images and artworks to assist spiritual and cultural practices is a crossover within the work. The various purposes and how they overlay in contrast emerge, especially in large public applications. Audiences can find access points; something partially understood and new or different or unintelligible.

A: How do the Australian flora and animals contribute to the stories you are telling?

R: The plants and animals are part of that same process of morphing and altering things to make the work representative of place. The archways are a decorative element, and feel very English to my eye. I wanted to twist that and change the flora, changing the interpretation of the leaves and blooms to sit with where we are at a local level. These are key elements of the religious graphic works I was looking at, so I could use this as a basis for the structure of the images but change it completely. Showing these elements in the works is metaphorical and inclusive of how important plants and animals are to our cultural outlook. I like including interesting things in art from the past in new works, to make a kind of conversation. These works talk to art from the past.

A: The gold flames lit around the heads of the figures are so luxe and powerful. What do these flames represent?

R: I was thinking about these works and the importance of halos as a thing of Christian tradition. The question of how to include this in the work, that took a long time to work out. I don’t really like halos as they are, so I wanted to make them less benign and more dramatic, with more intensity. The halos have movement and energy unpredictability, a sort of lively quality – emblazoned. I was thinking about the importance of fire, as a large component of broad cultural practice, ceremonial practice, the everyday and how we perform maintenance of Country. Fire had the right kind of attention-grabbing, striking feature. I wanted to have something that had a healthy quality, a powerful identifier in the face of our strength and spirit being extinguished.

Images: Ryan Presley, Marri Ngarr, Paradise won 2024, digital colour print on self-adhesive vinyl film with 24k gold leaf overlay; digital colour print on self-adhesive vinyl film and hand painted and cut MDF Commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, 2024