CROWNING GLORY

2013, Oil on Italian Linen, 120 x 100cm

Finalist, The Nillumbuk Prize 2013
Finalist, The Kilgour Prize 2014

There is corner of a foreign field that is forever England. Well almost.

Half-obscured behind a row of trees from the traffic banked back along Penang’s Burmah Rd, lies the mouldering pile that is the Queen Victoria Memorial Statue. Already long-dead, she was enshrined in 1930 as the embodiment of Empire. At least, during WWII the occupying Japanese forces certainly thought so. They had the lions around the plinth have their Union Jack shields cut off, her body concealed behind propaganda hoardings and the Imperial Japanese flag flown from her head.

They needn’t have bothered. More efficiently than any of the clumsy Japanese efforts, the citizens of contemporary Penang have swept away all vestiges of colonialism - simply by ignoring her. Dwarfed by a basketball court that abuts the plinth, she has been forgotten by all - save the mad dogs and Australians, out in the midday sun.