Event End Date: June 1, 2025 - 10:00 AM
Website: www.sl.nsw.gov.au
Location Map:
Location: State Library of NSW, Macquarie Street, Sydney NSW 2000
Dates: Mondays to Thursdays, 9am to 8pm, Fridays, 9am to 5pm, Weekends, 10am to 5pm, Wednesday 19 June to Sunday 1 June 2025
Cost: Free
Book tickets: https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au
The Country Cries for Truth is a dramatic and intimate exhibition by renowned Bundjalung artist Dr Bronwyn Bancroft that celebrates family and connection to Country while delving into colonial legacy.
Dr. Bronwyn Bancroft, an artist, book author/illustrator, mother, and truth-telling fighter from the Northern Rivers of NSW, has a masterful approach to her work, and this exhibition will take you on a journey of wonder and meditation.
Allow yourself to be given a new perspective on our common past through Dr. Bancroft’s artistic methods; while Country was previously captured being ravaged, Bronwyn lovingly invites you to see it being brought back to life through her use of color, distinct lines, and added imagery.
Dr. Bronwyn Bancroft completed a series of works for the State Library’s inaugural NSW First Nations Creative Fellowship in 2021-22. These pieces feature vibrant depictions of family and holy objects from the country, as well as mixed-media artworks inspired by old photographs from the Library’s JW Lindt collection.
Bancroft’s work delicately highlights the attempted erasing of Country through techniques including as painting on family portraits, captivating stencilled river-stone art, and purposeful sprinkling of colour and patterns over colonial historical images. At the same time, the works restore her ancestral lands with shadowy sentinel trees and vigilant mob figures, telling the observer that her people are still there and alive.
The Country Cries for Truth commemorates Dr. Bronwyn Bancroft’s family and their continuous connection to Bundjalung Country. This exhibition invites us to pause and reflect on the devastation caused by colonization for Aboriginal people, as well as to recall the complicated and terrible repercussions of this past that continue to exist in Country.
– Cherokee Lord (curator), Indigenous Engagement, State Library of New South Wales.
I believe the title The Country Cries for Truth is linked to the struggle of Aboriginal people across the country, and the tears are genuine. Tears of grief, misery, displacement, unity, and triumph can be both joyous and sad.
– Dr. Bronwyn Bancroft
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