Collection: JACK WILKIE-JANS - A Cruel Tutelage

14 February — 18 April 2026

A Cruel Tutelage is both lament and affirmation. It’s darkness and light. 

A Cruel Tutelage abstractly explores the personal, spiritual and cultural impact of impositions designed to diminish First Nations peoples’ stewardship of Country and agency over the self. Artist Jack Wilkie-Jans (a Waanyi, Teppathiggi and Tjungundji man from Mapoon, Cape York Peninsula) presents three correlating bodies of work—created over a five-year period—that speak to this psychological tension yet are distinct in media. 

A series of short films, or “moving portraits” (as Jack calls them), engage with fragmented imagery, spoken word, and unsettling soundscapes to evoke states of fear, alienation and [ultimately] resistance. These works—including the exhibition’s photographic contributions—confront the ongoing political pressures and spiritual attack, shaped by colonial machinations (and other shadowy forces), proposing how steadfast Indigenous identity instils mettle in opposing these attacks.  

Their cut-up aesthetic mirrors the fractured experience of living, partially, under and in shadows, where identity and spiritual power are contested terrain, shaped by personal histories yet are continually attempted to be reframed by the forces of Evil. These portraits are anything but passive reflections; they are confrontations, questioning how Indigeneity is perceived and usurped by political and attempted spiritual devices of domination. 

Jack’s painted works remark on beings that go “bump” in the night, the watchers of Country, the Ancestral manifestations and the all-together non-human. These works are a recognition and rationalisation of these on-Country and metaphysical beings and their omni-presence.