Margaret Dawson
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1950
Skittle
- 1994
- Mixed media
- Purchased, 1995
- 1700 x 1020mm
- 95/11
Location: Touring Gallery A
Tags: black (color), criminals, masks (costume), people (agents), portraits, weapons, words, yellow (color)
Margaret Dawson’s Amusements series reimagined the story of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly, previously immortalised by the painter Sidney Nolan. With simple props, like those used in amateur theatre, she restaged the outlaw’s story as scenes themed around Victorian parlour games. In Skittle, Kelly’s famous homemade iron suit is replaced by a black balaclava, jacket, pants and boots. Silhouetted in front of a flag-like backdrop that suggests a blue sky and hot, dry land, Dawson-as-Kelly brandishes a long stick instead of a shotgun. The effect is intimidating, but oddly insubstantial, the shadowy glimpse of a real person behind the legend.
(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)
Exhibition History
Skittle is an altered and re-staged ‘portrait’ of the colonial Australian anti-hero and outlaw, Ned Kelly. Part of a series Margaret Dawson called Amusements, the work explores the role of the outsider. Dawson’s photographs often consider themes of gender politics and Skittle draws a correlation between the outlaw from society and women in traditional roles. Her contention is that both are marginalized.
Dawson regularly draws on images from art history, and the photographs in Amusements were inspired by a series of paintings of Ned Kelly by Australian artist Sidney Nolan (1917-1992). In style, Skittle relates to the staged photographs of American artist Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) that depict the artist in the role of both subject and photographer.
Dawson has received degrees in both Fine Arts and Feminist Studies from the University of Canterbury. She has been granted numerous awards and her work is represented in most major art institutions in New Zealand.
(Opening Gallery hang, 2003)