Karla Dickens

Karla Dickens (born 2 December 1967) is an Aboriginal Australian installation artist of the Wiradjuri people, as of 2020[update] based in Lismore, New South Wales.

She loved geography (discovering the world), maths (she was good at it) and art, and continually made things at home, cutting and pasting.

She and her daughter built a family with dog, rabbits, big vegetable garden and lots of creative space.

In 2007 she moved to the Lismore suburb of Goonellabah to an old house with plenty of studio room and made a home for herself and her daughter where they grow their own food.

[a] She found an old Australian flag at her local tip, and embroidered it with black crosses so it became a symbol of Aboriginal mourning.

Her work Bound comprised six straight jackets she had dyed and then embellished with various found items, including human hair, combs and monkey teeth.

In March 2020 the Art Gallery of New South Wales commissioned Dickens to create a work for a niche in its portico that has remained empty since it was built.

[8] Her work, A Dickensian Circus, was on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the Biennale of Sydney in December 2020.

[3] The work celebrates Indigenous circus performers and boxers who travelled in troupes around Australia to entertain and fairs.

"[4]In the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, titled "Monster Theatres", her Dickensian Country Show occupied an entire gallery space, as a "fun fair" with darker underlying meanings to the titles of the carnival rides: "Colonial Roundabout", "Live Stock" and "Warn a Brother".

[11] In 2013, Dickens won the 2013 Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize, worth A$40,000, for January 26, Day of Mourning.

[12][13] In 2018, she won the inaugural Copyright Agency Fellowship for Visual Art, worth A$80,000, to support her production of a new multimedia installation, A Dickensian Circus, celebrating Indigenous boxers and Lismore acrobat Cornelius Sullivan.