Becoming Home

2019

Kabi Kabi / Gubbi Gubbi Country is the land of my childhood. Rainforest Country, bordered by mountains, rivers and ocean. In the 1880s, most of the Kabi Kabi / Gubbi Gubbi people were violently removed from the land where I now live. My ancestors also arrived here at this time. I was never told of my family’s involvement in this war. It was not spoken of. There was a lot that was not spoken of. I cannot speak for ghosts, but I can see patterns. Patterns of intergenerational culture.

I grew up with violence in many forms. Suppression, repression and denial shaped the world I inherited. The land was powered over, owned, diminished, pillaged and controlled. My body was powered over, owned, diminished, pillaged and controlled. Frightened men fight until they die. I left so I would not die fighting back.

Now I have returned.

Becoming Home is a body of work made in the attempt to reconcile the violence and disconnection of the past. It sits at the meeting point of personal, familial and colonial histories. It holds my effort to come to terms with violence enacted against Kabi Kabi / Gubbi Gubbi people, against land, and against my own body. This work is not an act of repair in any complete sense. It is an act of witnessing. To myself. To others. To Country.

So I listen.

I listen to the deep knowledge carried by Traditional Owners. I listen to Country and its long intelligence of people, weather, water, stone and time. I listen to my body and its desire to be at peace within this place. To interrupt the inheritance of violence rather than reproduce it.

The drawings in Becoming Home are made through sensorimotor mark making. This method allows me to meet Country through the body rather than through representation. I draw while listening with skin, muscle, breath and balance. A conversation takes place between my sensory receptors and the terrain itself.

These works are records of the reverence that can exist between bodies of land and flesh. They are not documentary. They are petitions against the destruction of relationship. Love poems to Country. Attempts to learn how to belong without possession. To be held without erasure.

Becoming Home names both return and transformation. It is not a return to what was. It is a learning toward what might be made possible through careful listening, accountability and relation.

This work was made on Kabi Kabi / Gubbi Gubbi Country. With deep respect for Elders past, present and future.