Familija Suite
2005

“Stockdale’s 2005 series of photographic portraits, Familija, emulated early photographic portrait processes in which subjects posed in front of backdrops of exotic locations. For her backgrounds Stockdale created a series of paintings, Terra Nullius, which appropriated well known colonial landscapes by John Glover (1767-1849) and Augustus Earle (1793-1838) but left out the representation of the Indigenous inhabitants. Several of these beautifully constructed photographs reference important portraits of well-known Aboriginal people of the time, including Earle’s Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales (c.1826), and Thomas Bock’s Mathinna (1842). Stockdale substituted non-Indigenous models for the original Indigenous subjects, playfully ridiculing the notion of terra nullius as a farcical construct.”

_Bryony Nainby, 2016