Associate Professor Fiona Foley
Associate Professor Foley has a national and international profile as a leading contemporary artist and historian. Her work has produced substantial new knowledge around the Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act (1897), and her numerous exhibitions have shared this knowledge with audiences across the globe. Fiona has exhibited a total of 50 solo exhibitions and 175 group shows; created 14 public art commissions, and her art works are held in 23 collections including The British Museum and the Hood Museum of Art in New Hampshire, USA.
Her work comes with a string of accolades. Her monograph Biting the Clouds: A Badtjala perspective on the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act was awarded the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance in 2021, alongside a Highly Commended in the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. In recognition of her very fine achievements, Fiona has been elected an Honorary Fellow in the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Most recently, Fiona was awarded a DECRA for her project, “Investigating the Agency of Aboriginal Frontier War Memorials”.
Authored Books
2021 Bogimbah Creek Mission: The First Aboriginal Experiment, Foley F, Pirri Productions, ISBN 9780646848488
2020 Biting the Clouds: A Badtjala perspective on the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897, Foley F, UQ Press
2019 Badtjala – English/ English – Badtjala Word List (Wondunna Aboriginal Corporation & Pirri Productions 3rd & 4th iterations)
2015 Courting Blakness: Recalibrating Knowledge in the Sandstone University, Foley F, Martin-Chew L, Nicoll F, UQ Press
2006 The Art of Politics the Politics of Art: The Place of Indigenous Contemporary Art, Foley F, Keeaira Press
Journal Articles
2021 Fiona Foley, Exploding time past and time present, Griffith Review 73: Hey Utopia!, 2021, pp. 140-152
2020 Fiona Foley, “Why truth telling is the first step towards healing”, Australian Financial Review, 7 November 2020
2020 Fiona Foley, “The People of K’gari/ Fraser Island: Working through 250 Years of Racial Double Coding”, MDPI, Genealogy, (online international), 4(3), 74
2019 Fiona Foley, “All Men Choose the Path They Walk: Art and the Scales of Justice”, Griffith Review 65: Crimes and Punishments, 2019, pp. 97-108
2012 Fiona Foley, “Just little bits of history re-repeating”, Volume One: MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, pp. 24-29
2012 Fiona Foley, “I Speak To Cover the Mouth of Silence”, Art Monthly Australia, Issue 250 Critical Lining, pp. 55–57
2012 Fiona Foley, “The Elephant in the Room: Public Art in Brisbane”, Artlink (Indigenous), Vol 32 No 2, Mega Issue, pp. 64–67
2011 Fiona Foley, When the Circus Came to Town, Art Monthly Australia, Issue 245, November 2011, pp. 5–7
1997 Fiona Foley, “A Blast From the Past, Periphery”, Issue No 31, pp. 5-7
1996 Fiona Foley, “Where the Salt Water Meets the Fresh Water”, Periphery, Issue No 27, pp. 20–23
1994 Fiona Foley, “Traditional Boundaries: New Perspectives”, Periphery, Issue No 18, pp. 8–10
Book Chapters
2023 Book Chapter, Foley, F., Bargallie, D., Carlson, B., Nicoll, F. Reason and Reckoning: Provocations and Conversations About Re-imagining Samuel Griffith’s University. In: Carlson, B., Farrelly, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28609-4_15
2021 Book Chapter, Counter – Monuments: Indigenous Settler Relations in Australian Contemporary Art and Memorial Practices, Springer. Work is in editing/pre-press.
2021 Book Chapter, Disrupting the Silence: Australian Aboriginal Art as Political Act, Expanding the Parameters of Feminist Activism edited by Gillian Hannum and Kyunghee Pyun, Palgrave Macmillian.
2019 Fiona Foley, Fiona Nicoll, Zala Volcic, Dominic O’Donnell, Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education. Seeing Through the Cracks, Volume I, pp 179–203.