Shevaun Wright

Informed by her Aboriginal and Irish settler heritage, Shevaun Wright utilizes the contractual medium, found legal text, Artificial Intelligence and mapping technologies as tools to critique the Western legal system. Her practice is interdisciplinary and research based, drawing upon her experience as a commercial and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) lawyer, as well as feminist, institutional and de/re/post-colonial theories. After undertaking Creative Australia’s ACME London residency last year, her practice has focused upon large-scale counter-mapping, archival research, and visual data translation. This reflects her interest in the developing discourse on data colonization and tracing complex personal histories of identity as a means of interrogating the colonial foundations of law and property.

Working across painting, collage, digital media and installation, Wright employs data visualisation and mapping technologies to depict the legal and visual mechanisms of dispossession. Her PhD research, ‘The Violence of Abstraction,’ examines the legal fiction of terra nullius and the emerging parallels in the digital landscape, where data is similarly conceived as a natural, ‘free’ resource open to extraction. Western cartographic histories that radically altered the state and communities’ relationship to land are set in relief against the attempts to ‘datify’ and map the inner world of human consciousness.