- Artwork
Un/sedimenting the Terrain
Un/sedimenting the Terrain, 2023
Looking south from the Antulya ridges, Central Australia.
Materials: Central Australian Pastoral Lease Map, 1922; NT Department of Education High-Level Design Consultation Paper, 2021; rice paper; sandpaper; charcoal; tints, spay paint.
Dimensions: 1520 x 840
I am interested in how the dynamics of any given moment is conditioned by the sedimentational present of past-future material flows and the legal, economic, ecological and social forms that create them.
On daily walks along the Antulya – Undoolya ridges, Racy dog and I sit in the shade of a merne atwakeye-wild orange tree in the presence of Anthwerrke-Emily Gap, Ntaripe-Heavitree Gap and Alhekulyele-Mt Gillen.
Undoolya pastoral station, whose name derives from the Arrernte term Antulye, bears the marks of its history—rusty barbed wire stretches and swirls in episodes throughout the ridges. I am conscious of the colonial ma(r)kings that I carry.
‘Un/sedimenting the terrain’ is the process of walking, of layering education improvement plans on pastoral maps, of sketching with fast and intense gestures that follow eye, hand and heart, and of slowly and meticulously cutting stencils. As I proceed, these sedimented layers are sanded to reveal, repattern the grammatical, political, syntactical, semantic and aesthetic strictures that make up educational improvement plans and pastoral leases. Daily practices of walking-thinking-creating-sitting-with unceded Arrernte Country unsediments colonial patterns and trajectories that mark Arrernte Country and myself, the walker.
As artist-teacher-researcher, my work aerates concepts such as ‘deficit gaps’ in education, which makes us all prisoners of the problems and promises asserted in each and every government education report, strategic document and high-level consultation paper. Sedimenting, repetitive patterns established when the explorer John McDouall Stuart planted the British flag on a central Australian ridge in 1860.
Policy can take us all apart in its glory
DOBBY – Ancestor, from their album Warrangu: River Stories
Agential Bodies In The Making, 2020
Walking Arrernte Country, writing, sketching, chatting around a fire are all material happenings of Arrernte Country.
Constellations of spacetimematterings within the undulating Antulye ridges where in/animate entities – even the tiniest resurrection fern growing amongst rocks, the finest grain of sand, rhizomatic root systems, sitting, walking, listening, sketching – are inseparable to Arrernte Country.
The two twisted apmurne-mulga trees tune into and are connected to all possible pathways, all possible relationships, all possible times and becomings. These entities are not something outside of the experience of walking, sketching, writing, gathering. Meaning that they are not mute, docile and generalisable entities, they are portals of different past-present-futures.
This approach—of —challenges Western systemic thought and practice, presenting a seismic philosophical shift. It invites a deeper recognition of vibrant storied Arrernte Country.
Dimensions: 180 cm 106 cm
Materials: Two large post-it notes, masking tape, graphite, pastel
Photographs of ‘Un/sedimenting the Terrain’ and ‘Agential Realism: Bodies In The Making’ by Eremaya Albrecht, 2024
It is not just humans that generate story, delia, ipelyakwe-migratory grey teal duck, and ure-fire intimately generate different realities, in reciprocity-with Arrernte Country.
Through Arrernte and agential realist ontologies and creative practices, the world does not passively await human-instigated social processes that capture art, data and relationships as representations; rather, they are generative bodies ma(r)king different ways of thinking-doing-being.