Esquire Studio Sessions: Dylan Mooney takes us inside ‘The Story Of My People’

The proud Yuwi, Torres Strait and South Sea Islander artist speaks to Esquire about illustration, uncovering artefacts and returning stories to his community

By Amy Campbell

Published: Aug 2, 2024

Dylan Mooney working on ‘The Story Of My People’. Photography: Louis Lim

ON A DARLINGHURST tower, overlooking the Eastern Distributor and Sydney Harbour over yonder, is an artwork by Dylan Mooney titled ‘Still Thriving’. The 40 metre-tall mural was erected as part of Sydney WorldPride 2023, but the work — which pictures two young men wearing traditional paint sharing a tender embrace — has now become a fixture of the neighbourhood. It’s brightly coloured digital illustrations like this that Mooney is best known for, his depictions of queer love among young First Nations Australians, as well as members of his community fighting the climate crisis urgently impacting the Torres Strait, have resonated far and wide.

But for his current show, Mooney returned to the art form he first took a shine to in year seven: portraiture. Swapping his computer for a pencil, Mooney set about recreating photographs of his ancestors — Australian Indigenous and South Sea Islander peoples whose lives, cultures and identity were taken from them as a result of colonisation. He was able to unearth the photographs, which were taken across the 1800s, in institutions like the State Library of Queensland.

“There’s a lot of information held within these collections that’s not known; the information [we do know] comes from the anthropologists, the photographers, or the people who collected these materials. So it’s really about reclaiming that, and giving the agency back to my people,” he told us on a recent visit to N.Smith Gallery in Sydney, where the exhibition is open until August 10. “With photographs back then, people hand to pose for over a minute, so I wanted to get that sense of how they had to stand there and hold those positions, and, what were they thinking at the time?”

The photograph Mooney’s largest work is based on — which took him three months to create — was very small, therefore the expressions on peoples’ faces were difficult to make out. But the detail on Mooney’s work is vivid. “I used my family’s faces as a reference,” he explains. “I was really just eyeballing and using my family’s faces, the placement of their noses and lips.”

Scroll on to watch our interview with Dylan Mooney, as he talks us through the works that make up ‘The Story Of My People’, and why art is such an effective medium to share exactly that.