Fable, Folklore and the Fragar Family Tree
Jonathan McBurnie
Director, Rockhampton Museum of Art
Julie Fragar’s striking 2014 work, Penned Like Chickens Eaten Like Chickens (Fiji) was a canny and precise acquisition on the part of the gallery, purchased at pivotal artistic moment, chosen from the artist’s Gold Award entries. The Antonio series, as it has come to be known, marked a turning point of the artist’s practice, a point at which Fragar was consciously stepping outside of her immediate experience, and even outside of her own time, away from the method of working she had been developing for some years.
The series explores a fascinating branch of Fragar’s family tree, in her ancestor, Antonio de Fraga. Where her recent work (Marathon Boxing, shown at Sydney’s Sarah Cottier Gallery) represented a searing, emotional outpouring of anger and sadness after a particularly charged series of major life changes, the Antonio works were decidedly inward-facing. Instead of creating the responses to life that she had become known for, Fragar this time pivoted toward a more imaginary space, effectively distancing herself from recent psychic turmoil and embracing a project that could allow a sense of the epic, and even poetic, circumstances that conspire over the eons, leading down the ages to the present. Such grand sweeping, ancestral narratives may reduce us down as individuals, powerless in the hands of fate, but there is a melancholic comfort in this surrender.
The fragmentary true story of Antonio is fascinating. At 12, leaving his family home in the Azores (Portugal), Antonio was packed onto a whaling ship by his father in an attempt to save him from being enlisted. The vessel was shipwrecked, and Antonio managed to survive, making it to Tonga and/or Fiji (this is a disputed detail in the family lore and related documentation), where he lived for some time. As Fragar explains, the narrative is incomplete, being made up of the few documents that remain, but what is known is that Antonio fled the island for fear of cannibalism, assisted by missionaries, eventually making his way to Australia, where he lived out his days. The incompleteness of Antonio’s backstory begged the artist to fill in certain details, particularly the grieving of his mother— Antonio would never manage to get word back to his parents— which was explored in an accompanying text work. This work, entitled Father Takes Control, Mother Goes Mad, anchors the series, giving it a start and end point from which to approach the other works.
Using her son Hugo as a model for Antonio, who was at the time the same age as Antonio when he left on the whaling ship, many of the works maintain a connection to Fragar’s characteristic self-portraiture. However, Fragar does not appear once throughout the work, per se. With many of the paintings being made of both transparent and solid ‘colliding’ images, their snatches and passages hint at possible real-world incidents and human relationships, and Fragar’s presence‒ or is that Antonio’s, or Hugo’s presence‒ permeates the work. By filling out the fragmented narrative of her forbear, Fragar not only examines a fascinating part of her familial past, but simultaneously engages with the metaphysics of art and history. By fleshing out and then interpreting and expanding upon Antonio’s story, the core of self-portraiture is exposed for the half-truth, the construct, that is has always been. While Fragar continued to use photography as a reference source, the Antonio works saw a conscious reconfiguration of her image making process, engaging more consciously with staging and composition, revealing scenes that we can hardly imagine, much less photograph, imbricating myth and reality.
Such a complex and almost folkloric family story that still resonates in Fragar’s extended family, provided a new opportunity to use the multi-facetted layered imagery to explore multiple subjects, perspective and time periods in one work. These works also involved (and necessitated) the reconfiguration of biographical narrative into something fictional; a history from so long ago told through so many generations is undoubtedly embellished. The tension between the biographical and the fictional is heightened in these works through Hugo ‘playing’ Antonio. In a sense, this series operates as a kind of palette cleanser for everything the artist had created up til this point, taking familiar aspects of Fragar’s artistic practice (layered imagery, text works, posed reference photographs), rolling them together and extending them into and more sophisticated, nuanced and malleable visual and narrative territory. Despite the temporal dissonance, there is plenty of grist for the narrative mill in Antonio’s story that aligns with some of the recurring themes of Fragar’s usual practice, most notably the complexity of family extending into a meaningful and sometimes playful manipulation of metaphysics between artist and subject.
The series was partially informed by a trip to the Azores, where Fragar, in a continuing familial searched for Antonio’s birth certificate, was unexpectedly reminded of the maximalist (yet nuanced) narrative power of Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch’s intense palette and densely packed worlds would be immediately applicable to Fragar’s work, particularly in compositional terms, and Penned Like Chickens Eaten Like Chickens embodies this lipid, robust (yet sensitive) application of paint. Works like Cannibal Tom 2014 and the Whaling 2014 brought a deeper, tougher commitment to the layered works; no longer were these merely overlaid, but sections within sections began to emerge once again, in a sense incorporating the collage technique of her 2009-10 period back into the layering techniques of the then-recent Ghost Skin and Marathon Boxing series. The results are compelling.
It was around this time that the artist began to understand, or take advantage of, her seemingly iterative studio habits. With each series since the mid-2000s had come some form of development, a step forward, or pivot away from, the last series. It was during the Antonio series that Fragar demonstrates the freedom to reintegrate aspects of each series that had come before, which has the remarkable effect of unifying her practice and drawing out specific elements which had been present in some sense the entire time. Here on in, Fragar’s practice would challenge its own established canon, and build a broader and more nuanced visual lexicon, which has only gained momentum in the intervening years. Penned Like Chickens Eaten Like Chickens remains one of the key works of the Antonio series, and thus a key work of Fragar’s formidable, and still evolving, oeuvre.
February 2022