Brenda L Croft

born 1964, Perth, Western Australia
lives and works, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory
Gurindji/Mutpurra language group (NT) Anglo-Australian

Brenda L. Croft is of a generation of Indigenous artists expressing contemporary stories and issues informed by her own cultural heritage and experiences.

Since 1998, Croft has worked with digital media to create images that layer photographs and text exploring autobiographical subject matter. Croft was born the daughter of a white mother and an Aboriginal father who was stolen from his parents at the age of two under the government policy that allowed for the removal of Indigenous children from their families

History and personal memory intersect in this series of prints, which use Croft’s family snapshots and other borrowed text to consider the artist’s family experience of growing up in the suburbs of Perth in the 1960’s.

Western Australia and indeed Australia of the 1960’s encompassed vastly different experiences for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, including immigrants, or “New Australians”. Prior to the 1967 National Referendum, Australia was a place where Aboriginal people lived under the restrictions enforced by authorities of the day such as night curfews, ‘dog tags’, city restrictions, fringe camps and the removal of children from their families.

Other selected artwork acquisitions