Perth Voice Interactive

TRAUMATISED childhoods thread together two diverse artists in Memories and Dreaming.

Jacquie Penton Skipp and her sister would cower in their beds, listening as their mother was beaten by their abusive father, scared but thankful it wasn’t them this time.

“He was mainly physical towards my mum,” Penton Skipp tells the Voice.

Her older sister invented “other worlds” to shut out the sounds so, “to whisk us away from reality… I would disappear into my own dream worlds, awake and asleep in order to escape too”.

For Margaret Fane, witnessing the treatment of Aboriginal people more than 50 years ago in Geraldton scarred her for life.

Living in squalid shacks with no running water, sanitation was difficult: black kids suffered at the hands of school bullies and were told to stand at the back of the school bus.
“People wouldn’t sit next to them because they stank…they looked really sad,” Fane recalls.

She in turn was bullied for standing up for Aboriginal kids: “My sister had to get on the bus to stick up for me.”

Fane’s powerful painting of white kids sitting — while Aboriginal kids stand, tears pouring down their cheeks — sums up an anger that still burns.

“These are my memories, I’m not making this up, this is what happened. And it needs to get out there,” she tells the Voice.

Penton Skipp’s art is a surrealist mix of childish images such as Disney’s Pluto, with serious overtones. “All my work has a comical and a dark side, taken from childhood dreams. They were recurrent which is why I remember them so well,” she says.

Fane donated more than $50,000 towards refurbishment of St Mary’s Cathedral with previous exhibitions, and this one is a fundraiser for former archbishop Barry Hickey’s work with orphanages in the Philippines.

The orphanages rescue abandoned and orphaned girls, most forced into prostitution, some as young as 12, Father Hickey says.

Memories and Dreaming is on at Ellis House Gallery, 116 Milne Street, Bayswater, February 4–21. Open Thurs–Fri 10am–4pm, Sat–Sun 10–5pm.

by JENNY D’ANGER