2020 IB Extended Essays

In the artist’s appropriation, white Australian settler personalities are removed from

the traditional banknotes and replaced with meticulous and impossibly detailed water-coloured portraits of formidable Aboriginal heroes - such as Fanny Cochrane Smith, Vincent Lingiari and the Gurindji activist. The physical exchange of money which takes place in the exhibition of the series allowed Presley to engage an

audience in conversations discussing a version of Australia that’s represented

through an economic and political standpoint, illustrating how Australia’s wealth has

come at the expense of Indigenous people’s lives . Like today’s exchange system,

the fictious currency of Blood Money fluctuates too ( Look again: the artist reinventing Australian money for postcolonial payback, 2019 ). Reviewing this series of work, the audience becomes embittered at being short-changed by the constantly changing exchange rate. Yet such emotions were entirely intentional. Presley seeks to provoke these reactions as they mirrored how the First Nations peoples felt having endured two centuries of dispossession, merely shadowing the injustice that prevails.

Ryan Presley, Blood Money exhibition, 2016.

After the opening weekend alone, $32,000 was collected from the operating exhibition. Presley ensured that all money raised from the event was given to charities in Sydney and Alice Springs that work with Aboriginal young people, in an effort to help improve the socio-economic disadvantage that the next generation will