Sixteen illuminated glass shields held aloft by electric wires cast their aerial shadows on an oblong, white cloud-like podium at the center of My Country, a stunning new exhibition housed at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. Emerging artists from each and every Australian state. and the territory have been commissioned for the exhibition, and the resulting works will form part of the gallery’s permanent collection.
These violent delights, Aidan Hartshorn’s striking installation of sculptural lighting, mark a new direction for the Walgalu and Wiradjuri boy raised in the small rural town of Tumut, nestled at the foot of the Snowy Mountains. Each of the diamond-shaped glass panels represents the proud culture of the bark shields of Wiradjuri and also the erasure of the culture through the 16 dams of the Snowy Hydro system, causing the disappearance of the Tumut River and flooding the sacred place where it began.
This conflicting duality is captured in the play’s striking title, taken from Friar Lawrence’s turn of words as he reflects on the good looks and bloodshed at the center of the young lovers’ pastime in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which ends with “. . . to have violent aims. ‘
“That’s why electric power is a general and violent delight to us, because we want it,” Hartshorn says. “I love the air conditioning and the TV. I’m going to give it up. But what have we lost as people?
The intensity and richness of the multi-level conversations presented in My Country are remarkable. The inaugural presentation of a biennial series, is a collaboration between NGV and Australian store Country Road, which facilitates 8 artistic partnerships between exhibited artists and supportive mentors. Hartshorn guided through his clever friend James Tylor, a Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna) and Maori (Te Arawa) man.
Hartshorn spent most of his young life in or around Brungle Creek, which flows into the Tumut River. “There’s this connection for me, with the water and the other people in the water, so it was written in the sky that this painting was going to happen,” he says.
For Hartshorn, assistant curator at the National Gallery of Australia and professor of new art and field-based methodologies, sharing wisdom is very important to her practice. “Materiality is all I teach my students, keeping in mind that each and every curtain “What you bring to the paintings has an inherent story,” he says. “And the same goes for glass. It’s a way for me to look at absence and presence. It is also contemplating the concept that anything is fragile, and for the Walgalu culture, it is a fragile space, because we are a forgotten people in this region. This glass is also a curtain that is used as insulation in electrical installations. “
He notes that the planned expansion of the hydroelectric project “will lead a pipeline through our sacred mountain, which our other people will cross, when they die, to reach heaven. “
Pragmatic, he shares with Professor Marcia Langton, a descendant of the Yiman and Bidjara peoples of Queensland, that “reconciliation is dead” after the calamitous referendum, but that a new path will have to be discovered for true mutualism between First Nations peoples and the rest of Australia, allowing for self-determination. Governments at all levels and organizations like Snowy Hydro Allocation want to come to the table to talk about how we can do things better. ” We can be pragmatic and say those assignments have to happen, but is there a way to do it with the community?
“If local councils could make profits to buy land and employ more people, we could have a say in what happens in those places,” he says. “It’s about giving us an area to say, ‘What are we going to do from here?'”
You can feel the river flowing gently as you look at Hartshorn’s alluring paintings, and feel the wind on your skin as you absorb the similarly moving Fragments through Pataway, Burnie-based artist Cheryl Rose. Rose was mentored through her regular collaborator Denise Robinson. Whether it’s Trawlwoolway women. A multidisciplinary painting incorporating a moving audio-visual component developed with virtual artist Darryl Rogers and the ancient Japanese culture of Kozo paper, it tells a deeply private story about First Nations standing and pride generously presented to new interpretations.
Rose spent her formative years in the outcrops of Pinmatik/Rocky Cape in north-west Lutruwita/Tasmania, watching her father fish and her mother dig up the cowrie shells she would treasure. This is where he deposited his late mother’s ashes. “Darryl came out to Country, sat down with me and filmed, and those ghostly photographs are reflected in the work,” he says. “My mother’s face appears. “
It’s Rose’s first time running with Kozo, a procedure that involved soaking the paper canvas with water and tea “countless times until I pushed her to the limit and almost cried,” she says. “It creates all those delays. “
During the artistic process, Rose temporarily borrowed old equipment from the archives of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and returned it to the country. “These fragments make up the whole story, so I was given permission, and Denise and I were given a box, and with my two sons, who are 24 and 27, we went back and put some of those curtains in the cave,” she said. Unfortunately, we couldn’t leave them there. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do is put this curtain back on that box, but it’s a very emotional experience.
Like Hartshorn, Rose also adopts a pragmatic preference for healing old wounds. “I’m thankful to the Gallery team because they have this apparatus and they keep it safe, and we have access to it. That’s vital for us.
Childhood memories also vibrate in a superbly colorful triptych of wool rugs (Daruka, grass, water, granite) woven by Gamilaroi artist and textile woman Sophie Honess. Mentored by artist Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi Jonathan Jones, as well as wisdom holder Marc Sutherland and his cultural mentor. Amy Hammond, Honess delved into her changing understanding of Daruka, a site in Gamilaroi country (outside Tamworth) of wonderful importance of which she was unaware of her childhood.
“All my friends lived there and we climbed the big granite mountains, swam in the river and I was afraid of snakes and spiders and crabs,” he says. “I had no idea, but after moving to Sydney for a few years and then coming back from there, I joined a collective and learned so much more. Daruka vaguely means “Rainbow Snake Place” and is a massive ceremonial place for women.
Now it turns out that weaving is destined to be his way, and after traversing some 86,000 knots in tapestries, Honess has also discovered where probably divergent stories can come together again.
“Obviously, when the stations were set up and our lands were cleared, we still needed blankets so that our babies, aunts and grandmothers could bring our belongings and dress us,” Honess says. “Not being able to access the field and practice in our classic weaving, we switched from grass to cotton and wool, so these paintings will pay homage to that. There are so many black women and artists who don’t use classical materials, because at some point we may not do it anymore. And that’s also a wonderful cultural thing.
Kamilaroi boy, Warraba Weatherall, flanked by Girramay/Yidinji/Kuku Yalanji boy, Tony Albert, grapples with a tumultuous past, present, and long trajectory in his deeply poignant audio-visual work, Dirge. Cloistered in a dark gallery tucked away in the back corner of My Country, he’s anchored via a custom-made polyphon, a giant cylindrical music box studded with ferocious spikes that pluck the strings as it spins.
Weatherall wrote the music, in a way, with Dirge reading the Braille that the artist, professor and director of Griffith University’s Contemporary Australian Indigenous Arts Program, translated from violent colonial documents that leave a deep scar.
“People tend to think of them as innocent documents, so I tried to find other tactics to get other people to see them from another perspective, to then acknowledge the unethical processes, some of the violence, and some of the racism inherent in the way they were written, created, and distributed,” Weatherall says. In a cultural field, there’s no separation between the country and the rest of the world, so translating those words into Braille, reading those stainless metal spikes, gives you that visceral feeling, but it’s also dangerous. “
The profound effect of this contemplative and provocative piece is stunning, and symbolizes Western nations’ disdainful disdain for predominantly oral traditions, which will have to evolve if we are truly to move forward.
“There’s still this precedent in Western wisdom and epistemology: you see it in land claims with indigenous names, where they have to be corroborated through records of non-indigenous anthropologists from the 1850s or 1900s, which is a farce,” Weatherall says. It’s also about understanding that some of those tactics of thinking, those ideals and values that underpin those old colonial documents, are still very genuine and rooted in new institutions. They remain the basis of many policies and have genuine implications. It’s not that kind of esoteric thing.
My Country will be presented from 22 March to 4 August at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia.
Stephen A Russell is an arts writer based in Melbourne. His writing appears in Fairfax, SBS Online, Flicks, Time Out, The Saturday Paper, The Big Issue, and Metro magazine. You can listen to them on Joy FM.
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