Jessica Birk
Jessica Birk is a young Indigenous artist born in 1984 on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. Jessica is a proud descendant of the Yaegl people from The Clarence Valley in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales (‘NSW’). Through her art Jessica asserts herself as a contemporary storyteller of the Yaegl people. Through her art-making she explores the extent to which she can imprint her identity and personal experiences, as well as the notions of belonging and familial lineage, upon the imagery, the colours, the patterns and the forms in her work.
Jessica has a strong connection to both the Northern Beaches and the Northern Rivers regions of NSW. Her work focuses on these regions and aims to articulate her feelings of belonging that are tied to these places. For Jessica, the notion of belonging is an abstract one and she aims to develop a visual language that enables her audience to grasp the implicitly rich understanding of a landscape where belonging means knowing your country intimately. As such, every component of her images has a meaning where the colours, the patterns and the forms all combine to visually articulate the 'holistic’ experience of the landscapes.
In 2007, Jessica graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales. Since the beginning of her studies in 2003, Jessica has participated in a number of exhibitions including a Solo Exhibition at Manly Regional Art Gallery in 2006 and has continued to work on commissioned artworks. Jessica has won wide recognition for her work, including being named the joint winner of the 2009 QANTAS Young and Emerging Indigenous Art Award and as a finalist in the 2006 Parliament of NSW Indigenous Art Prize. More recently, Jessica completed an artist Residency at the Bilpin International Ground for Creative Initiative and a Solo Exhibition at Willoughby Council's Incinerator Art Gallery in 2012.
The artwork below was featured in the Indigenous Law Bulletin May/June, 2012 Volume 8 Issue 1.
