North Queensland Shield Design

Award winning artist Jennifer Herd (Mbarbarrum people) is among the founding members of Queensland’s Indigenous arts collective, proppaNOW, along with fellow artists and activists Richard Bell, and Vernon Ah Kee. Her creative practice began in installation, painting, and sculpture. Much of her work speaks directly to her background in fashion design by incorporating fabric, haberdashery, printmaking, and painting. While her work is delicately poised, it is also politically charged. Her motivations are focused on truth telling and aim to shine a light on the history of frontier resistance particularly in the region of her mother’s Country in Far North Queensland.

As a natural progression from Jennifer’s long-term passion and experiences working in fashion design, in 2010 she began using pin-holing as an art technique for both the aesthetic and as a political gesture. These seminal works reveal a quiet yet powerful resistance. Without the traces of drawing or paint, the viewer is drawn closer to the subtleties of the materiality combined with the heavy emotive qualities bound up in its meaning and intent.

The artist comments that she has used pinholes to highlight the bloody intersection of two cultures:

"They symbolise the many rainforest shields punctured with bullet holes during these frontier conflicts. As Christie Palmerston, an explorer at the time so chillingly wrote “Their shields may answer very well for the purposes of their wars, but my rifle drilled through these as if they were sheets of paper.”

These works pay tribute to the Bama warriors of the North Queensland rainforests in the Atherton Tableland region. These warriors fought valiantly over many generations to defend their ancestral lands from frontier expansion. The geometrical designs in the work reference the traditional painted shield unique to the region. These shields were not only objects of defence but also symbols of identity and conveyors of cultural knowledge and place.

Shield designs are my way of connecting to my culture and have been an abiding research interest of mine for over 25 years. Shields were and still are an important part of North Queensland heritage and culture. My shield designs are presented as a stark reminder of truth, frontier resistance and the aftermath of cultural identity stripped bare." (Jennifer Herd)