The Apotheosis Looks Different From Here, Artist Statement
Updated: 6 days ago
(Painting After Knowing Series)
Content note: This work engages with Australian colonial history and includes references to colonisation, dispossession and violence against Aboriginal peoples.
Artist Statement
The Apotheosis Looks Different from Here begins with an inherited image: the eighteenth-century engraving The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (1794), in which Cook is raised towards the heavens and transformed from navigator into an almost divine heroic figure. Rather than retelling Cook’s history, this work considers what happens to such as image once the knowledge surrounding it changes.
Cook is removed from this ascension and returned to earth as a lurid, kitsch porcelain figurine: ornamented, manufactured and fragile. His chipped pedestal introduces a fracture into the polished mythology that has preserved him as an object of national reverence. Cook remains elevated, immaculate and recognisable, but also strangely unreal: less the historical man than a representation repeatedly fashioned, displayed and inherited.
Layered across the background is detail from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages map, revealing the complexity of a continent already inhabited through countless generations. Its presence brings knowledge largely absent from the heroic imagery through which Cook has traditionally been represented. The background no longer provides a conventional historical setting but becomes an ambiguous space in which inherited representation and living knowledge coexist.
Cook’s open hand reaches outward, but his gaze passes beyond the frame. Above him, an aghast sulphur-crested cockatoo is startingly alive against the static unreality of the porcelain figure. A recurring trope throughout the series, the cockatoo acts as a witness, symbolising the meeting of living knowledge with inherited knowledge. Alert, animated and slightly absurd, it sees what the historical figure cannot while Cook’s gaze remains elsewhere.
The work considers what becomes of an inherited heroic image when other histories and ways of knowing enter the same visual field. Cook remains recognisable, but the image that once elevated him can no longer remain entirely secure.
Rachel Wolfe
9 September 2026
Rachel Wolfe is an emerging artist based in Hobart, Tasmania, currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania. With a diverse and evolving practice, Rachel explores various mediums and techniques to create captivating and thought-provoking works of art. To explore Rachel's latest projects and artistic journey, visit her website www.rachelwolfe.com.au or follow her on social media.
