Karla Dickens: A Dickensian Circus and Country Show

By Leigh Robb

Stepping into her Dickensian sideshow, we enter a world of clowns, outcasts, misfits and mystics. No holds are barred on Dickens’ stage, her unapologetic assemblages and sculptures speak to the atrocities of colonisation.

Karla Dickens in her studio, 2021. Photo: Natalie Grono

A master storyteller and maverick magician of assemblage, Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens has created a career defining body of work through her 'Dickensian Circus and Country Show' projects.

Dickens’ research into Con Colleano, a world-famous Aboriginal tightrope walker led her further to investigate the presence of First Nations performers in circuses, boxing rings, regional country fairs and Easter shows. Through her astounding series of installations, sculptures, photographs, assemblages and collages, Karla Dickens has reframed the ‘greatest show on earth’ as a dystopian carnival of Australian colonial history.

Installation view of 'Defying Empire', 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial 2017, National Gallery of Australia, featuring Karla Dickens, 'Assimilated Warriors' (detail), 2014 adorned masks in mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Zan Wimberley

When she premiered her project in two parts at the 2020 Adelaide Biennial and the 2020 Biennale of Sydney across two state institutions, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Karla Dickens unleashed a salient political satire on the historic and ongoing treatment of Aboriginal people. They were knock-out shows that were also a testament to her twenty years of art making.

Drawing on her vast collection of found objects from the Lismore tip, op-shops, bought online through eBay and from small auction houses, Dickens has repurposed the trappings of agricultural country fairs and bush rodeos to illuminate a shadow-side to Australia’s past. Collage is essential to Dickens’ practice as a means of compressing the past and the present and rearranging objects or imagery to offer up a counter-narrative to the colonial project.

Installation view of 2020 Adelaide Biennial of 'Australian Art: Monster Theatres' featuring Karla Dickens, 'A Dickensian Country Show', Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Photo: Saul Steed

Stepping into her Dickensian sideshow, we enter a world of clowns, outcasts, misfits and mystics. Her complex works play on the thrills of risk and taboo, violence as entertainment, and the spectacle of difference. Her fortune tellers offer portents of doom who regale with visions of a ravaged planet. No holds are barred on Dickens’ stage, her unapologetic assemblages and sculptures speak to the atrocities of colonisation, declaring, in her own words, that ‘True Horror is the massacre of Australia’s first people’.

Karla Dickens Installation view for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, 2020, Art Gallery of New South Wales featuring Karla Dickens, 'A Dickensian Circus', 2020. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the Australia Council for the Arts, Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, Create NSW, and generous assistance from Justine and Damian Roche. Photo: Zan Wimberley

Karla Dickens is also a talented writer and poet and she often accompanies or embeds her works with her written texts. Her first job was as a sign writer. One of the most poignant works in this series is a steel circus megaphone which features the painted words in Wiraddjuri, Wudhagarbidyabu gulbulaabu, an instruction to listen and hear, signalling that once the circus has left town, now is the time for deep listening.

Karla Dickens Installation view for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, 2020, Art Gallery of New South Wales featuring Karla Dickens, 'A Dickensian Circus', 2020. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the Australia Council for the Arts, Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, Create NSW, and generous assistance from Justine and Damian Roche. Photo: Zan Wimberley

The artist beckons audiences to her Dickensian sideshow, leading you on a rickety ride on a ghost train through a house of horrors, which is as thrilling as it is terrifying. Round after unforgiving round, Dickens keeps you riveted on the edge of your seat. By thrusting real-world objects that capture outdated cultural attitudes into motion with her own images Dickens has produced a staggering body of works that haunt and dramatically unsettle the present.

A DICKENSIAN COUNTRY SHOW

"A dark side of the circus behind the lights and make-up of the show is the hard reality of artists and show-people who are glued together with blood, sweat and tears searching for hope for a home-away-from-home

A tribe of misfits, outsiders, freaks and no-fits the throw-aways, the shunned, the rejected and the shamed gathering and nurturing each other with a sense of belonging entertaining and warming the hearts of those who abandoned them healing the cruel while enforcing their own existence

There are those who love to watch horror movies and car accidents unfold excited by the energy and horrifying misfortunes the thrill of potential death waiting for the acrobat to lose her footing the fat man to explode they feel beautiful as they cringe at the bearded lady the snake-man and any other human with unusual differences

As a source of inspiration they please the crowds delivering soul-food to the outwardly whole arriving in the shadows to embrace theirs the boxing tent is raised mobs punch the air as they watch black fellas bruise and knock each other across the canvas

They watch their dreams unfold as carnies scratch to feed themselves shovelling popcorn and dressed in their Sunday best making memories and dancing with deep desires sad clowns tie the truths together as they mock themselves teasing them with playful tomfoolery."