Helen Grace + Julie Ewington: Justice for Violet and Bruce

Justice for Violet and Bruce’ focuses on the historical domestic murder court case which took place in Sydney in 1980. A perceived miscarriage of justice for these victims of domestic abuse led to a community campaign which resulted in legislative change to allow the admissibility of ‘provocation’ in criminal sentencing.  Campaign photographs taken by photographer Helen Grace will be shown for the first time alongside street posters and a campaign banner on loan from the National Museum of Australia.  As a regional cultural institution, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery is proud to present this exhibition. It provides the opportunity to lead important community discussion and debate concerning domestic violence.

Curated by Julie Ewington.

More Information - Justice for Violet and Bruce

In 1976 Violet and Bruce Roberts were convicted of the murder of Eric Roberts, Violet’s husband and Bruce’s father, at Pacific Palms near Taree in regional New South Wales. By 1980 the public outcry against the injustice of their imprisonment was spearheaded by Sydney activist group Women Behind Bars. Violet and Bruce’s release from jail on 15 October 1980 turned on the recognition of the defence of provocation in cases of murder where there had been long-term domestic violence; it led to changes in the New South Wales Crimes Act.

Sydney artist Helen Grace photographed many public events staged by Women Behind Bars between May and October 1980 drawing attention to Violet and Bruce Roberts’s case. The campaign included vigils, marching through the streets of Sydney carrying a continuous scroll with thousands of signatures petitioning Parliament, and a presence in Macquarie Street outside Parliament House.

This project focusses on 253 photographs in Grace’s archive from 1980. It asks how images documenting an historical event, now over 40 years ago, are to be interpreted today? What issues are being foregrounded? What is the relevance today of a campaign about the long-term effects of domestic violence on families, on society? What changes have been made in Australian life since?

Many feminist artists committed to changing the lives of Australian women contributed to this campaign, which relied on the public visibility of their works. In Grace’s photographs you see handmade banners: Toni Robertson’s Justice for Violet and Bruce Roberts, which functioned as the campaign’s ‘logo’, is now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia, a tangible reminder of this history. The street posters at the far end of the gallery by Jan Mackay and Toni Robertson, however, have almost all vanished: their work was done.

Helen Grace and Julie Ewington: In the Project Lab

Over a long career, Sydney-based artist Helen Grace has made a substantial contribution to documentary and narrative forms of photography and film, and critical writing. Julie Ewington has had an equally sustained engagement with contemporary artists, working as an academic, curator and critic. When working together, they explore the contemporary conditions for arts practice.

This project sees Grace and Ewington in residence at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, working in collaboration to develop new work and explore existing ones across three two-week seasons between May and October 2022. A key feature of these three seasons is an invitation to artists, students and enthusiasts of all stripes to engage with Grace and Ewington at the Gallery and across the city: to share perspectives about photography, video, archival practices, writing and curating (and life), in an open-ended series of dialogues, meetings, laboratory sessions and studio visits.

About Helen:

Helen Grace (b Gunditjmara Country) is an artist, writer and teacher, based in Sydney (Wangal Country, Eora Nation) and (formerly) Hong Kong and Taiwan. Helen is an award winning filmmaker, photographer and new media producer and her work is currently on show in Know My Name, National Gallery of Australia. Her suite of works, And awe was all we could feel, will be shown in May at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, Melbourne as part of PHOTO2022. Her photomedia work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of NSW and Art Gallery of South Australia as well as private collections, nationally and internationally.

She has been exhibiting work since the late 1970s and her work was selected for Friendship as a Way of Life, University of New South Wales Art and Design Galleries, 2020. She was a finalist in the 2020 Bowness Photography Prize. Recent projects also include: The Housing Question (with Narelle Jubelin), Penrith Regional Galleries, Home of the Lewers Bequest, 2019, Thought Log, SCA Galleries, Sydney (2016) and Map of Spirits, Gallery 4A, Sydney (2015).

She was the Founding Director of the MA Programme in Visual Culture Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong and is now Associate, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney; in 2012-13 she was Visiting Professor at the National Central University, Taiwan. Her recent books include The Prosaic Image: Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media (Routledge, 2014) and the edited volume, Technovisuality: Cultural Re-enchantment and the Experience of Technology (with Chan, Kit Sze and Wong Kin Yuen), IB Tauris, 2016

About Julie:

Julie Ewington is a curator, writer and broadcaster based in Sydney. Her chief pleasure as a curator is working closely with artists, assisting them to bring their particular version of the world, and their fresh ideas about it, to new audiences and new conversations.

From the mid-1980s Julie worked as a curator in Australian galleries and museums. Between 2001-2014 she led the Australian Art department at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, and was a contributing curator for Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art between 1996-2012, working with both Southeast Asian and Australian artists. Recent curatorial projects include The Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria (2016); Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, at ACCA, Melbourne (2017); and The Housing Question: Helen Grace, Narelle Jubelin and Sherre DeLys, for Penrith Regional Gallery. (2019).

Since the early 1970s Julie has written widely on the visual arts and crafts. She has published books on Fiona Hall (2005) and Del Kathryn Barton (2014); contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues and anthologies; edited publications on both Australian and Asian art; and published in journals including Art and Australia, Artforum, Art Monthly, Australian Book Review, eyeline, and The Monthly.

Julie is currently Chair of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney and a member of the Board of Samstag Museum, Adelaide. In 2014 she was awarded the Emeritus Medal from the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board for work as a writer, curator and advocate.