Brisbane-based artist Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s practice centres on research into the Pacific labour trade in Australia and how it intersects with her own familial history as a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander.

Copper Archipelago 2024 has been created as a site-specific architectural intervention for the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial. A large boat-shaped structure, its surfaces recall the ornate ceilings eponymous with the Sydney-based Wunderlich family, famous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for manufacturing pressed-metal ceilings. Wunderlich ceilings are now considered heritage features in civic buildings throughout Australia and New Zealand, symbolising a celebration of the colonial settlement of these nations. Embossed with images relating to blackbirding and her own family, Togo-Brisby’s ceiling affirms her matrilineal lineage to ‘Granny’ (her great-great-grandmother), who was kidnapped from Vanuatu at the age of eight and acquired as a house slave for the Wunderlich family.

This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.