LABEL: Robin WHITE: 'Postcard from Pleasant Island' series
By Ruth McDougall
‘sis’ April 2024
The ‘Postcards from Pleasant Island’ series 1989 engages with the devastation wrought by decades of extracting phosphate on the islands of Nauru, co-undertaken by a Australian, British and New Zealand phosphate-mining board. Depicting the limestone pinnacles that appear like skeletal remains once the phosphate-rich rock is removed, these works incorporate spiritual messages of social responsibility with holiday greetings and factual information about the history of extraction on Nauru. Rather than making an overt political statement, White presents these ruinous island landscapes through the lens of her own spiritual belief in the growing need for divine protection and guidance that her Bahá’í faith promises.