THE Outlaw’s Inn, Benalla Art Gallery, VICtoria 2022-2023

Contemporary Benalla remains coloured by Ned Kelly history and mythology in equal parts. For artist Jacqui Stockdale, who was raised in Benalla before moving to Wangaratta in her teens to study Art, recent work has been “propelled by a question I asked myself as a young girl riding bareback through the hills of ‘Kelly country”……..what really happened here?” This line of questioning resulted in The Long Shot (2020), a body of work which used the Kelly story as a backdrop to visit and redress dominant narratives of Australian colonial folklore.

The Outlaws’ Inn, presents a macabre party of the in-laws and outlaws that surrounded the Kelly family. This motley crew includes a dancing Kelly sister, Kelly himself, a drunken bushranger, a Chinese pioneer and the insidious apparition of venereal disease. Kelly’s mother is seated in the corner, pregnant with her twelfth child at the age of forty-three. This highly theatrical scene is laced with dark humour and Stockdale invites us to sit with Ma Kelly, 2020 to watch this grisly, animated life-size diorama. A dog gnaws on a dismembered head, which is part of an original figure from the Ned Kelly Museum in Glenrowan, gifted to Stockdale during one of her many visits. A twirling dancer’s hand is embellished with the green sequins that adorn Mc Syphilis Whisper, 2020, seemingly transmitted as she brushes against him. 

Juliette Hanson, 2020