Easton Dunne: Welcome to Paradise

“Welcome to Paradise is a large artwork. It’s made up from lots of signs and symbols and shapes that you would see if you were driving through Rockhampton on the highway. There’s lots of country symbolism relating to the cattle industry because I grew up on a cattle property west of Rockhampton on unceded Wadja and Ghungalu Country and that’s an important part of my own experiences in this area.
Welcome to Paradise is also an unapologetic celebration of what it’s like to be a queer person living in Rockhampton, which probably sounds like the last place where you would find a queer utopia – I wonder what it would look like if we had a massive Mardi Gras up the main streets of Rockhampton and turned everything hot pink and fluffy. And so, it’s quite cool in that sense to see the work becoming the reference point for the branding for Melt Open.” – Easton Dunne