Grey Matter (Blak Enough) Painting

As a fair skinned Koori woman (Aboriginal woman from NSW in Australia), I am constantly justifying myself to white people as to why my greatest sympathies lie with my First Nations kin. My mother is white, and my father is half white – possibly more / probably less; so why would I align myself and my children with a people who have been trodden on, had their culture trampled, their land stolen and our lives ripped apart….because I am black enough and it is through black people (even those who are merely brown on the inside), that have a duty to change the future for Aboriginal people. Both a journey of self-reflection and self-actualization, Konstantina bravely faces her biggest critic (herself) and such heavy subject matter in the only way she knows how…. With bold, bright, fabulous colour backed on black. DIDACTIC: It is the space between black and white that should occupy our grey matter. This grey matter is a place of resilience, beauty and dreaming. Perhaps our New Dreaming or perhaps we should call it ‘change’, can only occur here in this grey space, the invertible space between the two existent ‘things’. Orange though, is often noted as the colour of urgency and change “It is the colour of Guantanamo Bay jumpsuits, Agent Orange and since 9/11, the second highest terrorist threat in the US. Orange is used in traffic signage and warning symbols on the roads, in part because it forms high contrast against the blue-grey asphalt…And the black boxes on aircraft which record flight information, are, in fact, orange, in the hope this will make them easier to find in the event of a crash.” So in my New Dreaming, I want to be orange, not Blak nor white, nor the grey matter between.