Perth Voice Interactive

MAYLANDS’ Eva Fernandez has won the Bayswater art award and $5000 for her wry take on colonisation.

Ms Fernandez says the battered suitcase in her photographic work alludes to middle-class Englanders who immigrated to Australia to annex land from the indigenous population.

“I was looking at these objects in terms of the impact they had on Australia’s land—it was a territorial premise,” she says.

“The process of colonisation has not stopped—it’s an evolving and changing process. I’m an immigrant myself and so these things became very obvious to me.”

Ms Fernandez was born in Canada to Spanish parents but has lived in Australia for more than 30 years.

She trained in traditional film photography but now mostly uses a digital camera. Suspending the case resulted in it becoming an unwitting reference to lynching, and deaths in custody, she says.

“When you can marry the aesthetic and the conceptual then you are on to something. It becomes very powerful, with lots of hidden meanings.”

Ms Fernandez also won the Armadale city council art award this year.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK