- My name's Karla Dickens.
I'm a Wiradjuri woman.
I'm a mother.
I live in Lismore with my daughter.
No, that's you.
Most of my work is collage based.
Yeah, it was out of need.
I just couldn't keep up with the bill of the paint.
So I'd just basically walk into art school,
walk into openings, walk into work,
if anything kind of caught my eye on the street,
I'd use that.
Just recently people have been looking at my work
thinking that they're completely painted.
I really like that decorative,
I love the embroidered red roses on the black fabric
and the white,
they're almost like a Bollywood kind of addition.
I think of my grandmother
and they had very little money
but the little doilies and stuff,
and embroidered pillow cases
were something of great value and preciousness.
In my work and just going through different fabrics
and you kinda know
that they've either been on somebody's bed or,
they're precious in some way,
not just to me but to somebody else.
That's my pallette now, the fabrics are my pallette.
Even the textures in them,
I find really important when I'm working
and I just felt like I had more depth and space
creating work using different mediums as well as the paint.
So the structure's built up on fabric
like these Black Madonnas.
There's been images of the Black Madonna
mainly in Europe from the 11th Century
and I learnt about the Black Madonna a number of years ago
after a spirit came into our house
and I rang a number of elders
and they come and smoked the house
and did some prayer
and I'd already started a body of work
and I just kind of left that by the wayside.
They say that the night is older than the day
so the Black Madonna is,
she's not just there for protection
but she also takes away.
It's almost that dark goddess side
and if you're really kind of
in a deep, dark time,
the Black Madonna is the one
that'll kind of guide you through
more than the Virgin Mary.
What's this one?
This is at home.
Australia's history with taking babies away
from their mothers
and it just seems like the perfect woman
to kind of be standing beside
or asking for protection off.
The golliwog came slowly
into the series of the Black Madonna
and just kind of taking back that
what's deemed to be
not a very culturally appropriate image.
Yet I know when I was a child, I loved my golliwog.
I was told I was a morbid child.
I'd always talk to my dead grandmother in the back.
Whenever my pets died
I was very big on burying them
and making crosses
and just celebrating that.
The shadowing and the darkness
has just always been,
I've just been really attracted to it
and it's probably just me learning to deal with my shadows
and darker sides.
- You're showing the queen
that telling her something bad's gonna happen.
- But it's okay.
- The darker you've seen, the lighter the light becomes.
So it's like the harder the time you've had,
the light just becomes brighter
and these basically were almost a meditation
and a protection,
I'd lost a lot of people I loved
and being a single mum,
these were just like a real affirmation
and that everything was gonna be okay
and that there was support and strength.