Jasmine Togo-Brisby
Jasmine Togo-Brisby is a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander artist who is currently based in Meanjin/Brisbane. Her great-great-grandparents were taken from Vanuatu as children during the Pacific slave trade and made to work in Australia. Togo-Brisby explores this dark history, and its contemporary impacts on the community today, through photography, filmmaking and sculpture.
Artist statement
Jasmine Togo-Brisby addresses cultural tourism, rupture and hybridity through appropriating souvenirs from her ancestral homelands of Vanuatu. She employs miniatures which mimic custom ‘tamtam’ slit drums that tower over 3 metres tall. Embodied and carved with ancient ancestral knowledge and gathered to form village orchestras which materialise ancestors’ voices.
Iconic symbols of Vanuatu visual culture and identity the tamtam is miniaturised and muted to cater for the tourism industry. Togo-Brisby moulds from her own tamtam collection then casts in plaster to create new hybrid forms, then laid in the formation of bodies in slave ships. She interweaves her family’s experience of enslavement into domestic servitude for the Wunderlich’s, a family renowned for their company ‘Wunderlich Ceilings’, Togo-Brisby claims their material legacy as her own cultural medium.