In Blak and White by Boneta-Marie Mabo
A solo exhibition of cyanotype prints
In Blak and White traces the systems that have sought to define, control and contain Blak children and families, from colonisation to the present.
Beginning with motherhood and childhood, the body of work centres Blak systems of care, kinship, cultural knowledge and belonging before tracing the expanding reach of colonial authority through protection, removal, education, labour, value, classification and incarceration. Rather than treating these as separate histories, In Blak and White considers them as part of a colonial continuum in which the language of care has repeatedly existed alongside practices of control.
Christianity is an important thread throughout this history. Christian ideas of morality, civilisation, family, work and salvation became entangled with colonial law and government policy. Churches, missions, schools and institutions claimed authority to protect, educate, civilise and reform Blak children, while disrupting relationships to family, culture and Country. Religious authority did not operate separately from colonial power; it helped provide a moral language through which intervention could be presented as benevolent.
Across the works, childhood is repeatedly made useful to systems beyond the child. Protection authorises intervention. Education becomes preparation for labour.
People become classifications. Blak lives acquire economic and institutional value. The works question not only how Blak children were treated within these systems, but who benefited from their intervention, labour and containment.
The works are created as cyanotypes on teabag paper. Cyanotype carries histories of both the blueprint and botanical record. Here, the process becomes a metaphor for a colonial blueprint: systems established to organise, reproduce and legitimise particular relationships of power. Yet a blueprint is also something that can be exposed, examined and challenged. Tea carries its own colonial histories of trade, rationing, domestic service and labour. The paper becomes more than a surface: Blak contained within white, held inside a material designed to contain while allowing extraction through it.
In the final work, Incarceration, this relationship becomes physical. Real grevilleas and photographic negatives of grevilleas are placed directly onto sensitised teabag paper and exposed to light. The physical plant leaves its trace alongside its photographic representation, drawing on cyanotype's historical relationship to botanical documentation and the blueprint. Here, the grevillea also carries a contemporary carceral meaning, connecting the colonial histories traced throughout the exhibition with the systems that incarcerate Blak children today.
In Blak and White does not position colonisation, removal and institutionalisation
safely in the past. It asks what persists when institutions are renamed, policies rewritten and the language used to describe intervention changes.
What happens when care becomes control, education becomes labour, people become classifications, and protection becomes incarceration?
