Daniel Boyd

There’s a plate in the Chau Chak Wing Museum that used to belong to Robert Louis Stevenson. I imagine he brought it with him from San Francisco and ate dinner from it when he lived in this part of the world – he travelled in the Pacific with his family from 1888, visiting Sydney and settling finally in Apia, where he died in 1894. Stevenson’s plate is an unremarkable piece of china, late Victorian transferware from the Ridgway Potteries in Stoke-on-Trent. It’s patterned in widely spaced orange flowers which look quite like English hedgerow campions, but the name of the pattern is ‘Persia.’ It’s a design that was widely exported to the US. In fact, you could pick one up right now on eBay for less than $100, were you so inclined.

Stevenson’s plate is the subject of several works by Daniel Boyd. Perhaps I’m wrong to call it his subject, though: better to say that Boyd has painted versions of the plate, in different colours and at different scales, several times. In The National 4, the plate and Boyd’s paintings of it are exhibited side by side.

‘I’m interested in proximity,’ says Boyd. ‘It would have been present at conversations at dinner every night. When he passed away, it ended up in the museum collection. I like the idea of these objects that move between contexts. I'm tracing them in a nonlinear way.' (1)

Stevenson’s most famous novel was Treasure Island (1882), a rollicking adventure story set on a desert island. Treasure Island is also the title of a major painting Boyd made in 2005, a version of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) map of Australia showing where Indigenous languages were spoken prior to 1788. In a related work, he painted a version of Emanuel Phillip Fox’s Landing of Captain Cook in Botany Bay, 1770 (1902), giving Cook a black eyepatch and adding a skull-and-crossbones to the unfurled Union Jack flag planted on Dharawal land. ‘They call them pirates out here,’ Boyd wrote in paint under the image.

Perceptions of a place, says Boyd, ‘can be tainted by a fiction.’

While it has been influential on a century of fictional representations of pirates, Stevenson’s story of an uninhabited, distant island filled with treasure ripe for the plunder may also be seen as an allegory for the colonial project. Convenient fictions, and misrepresentations of place and of peoples, were a colonial stock-in-trade, and they have continued to shape perception.

Over the last decade, Boyd has developed an approach to painting which acts as a powerful form of resistance to the pervasive fictions of colonial history. He covers his paintings with translucent dots that both obscure the image and refract it into an abundance of lenses which deny a singular view. A system of titling his work with unexplained acronyms makes it clear that not all knowledge is available to the viewer: some is held back by the artist. In his use of existing imagery drawn from museum or archival collections, or in his representation of enigmatic objects adrift in the world like Stevenson’s dinner plate, Boyd asserts an Indigenous re-vision  of history. In bringing the original object – itself a multiple – together with its painted version, Boyd, as he puts it, ‘expresses the poetic in opposition to the definitive.’

(1) All quotations drawn from an interview between the artist and author, November 2022.