Curing, 2021. Kelp, metal, tarlatan, sound.
Artists Cassie Sullivan and Josh Prouse present a haunting exploration of indigenous identity. These multidisciplinary works including installation, video, photography and sound, come together with the weight of the past and a reckoning with the present. Through sensory and material bodies we reflect on the ghosts of the past that are carried with us today.
The work speaks across two sites, in conversation with each other and with the grounds that hold them, Kelly’s Garden, nipaluna/Salamanca and The Barracks, New Norfolk.
The works look at what it means to be embedded in, and displaced from Country, identity, belonging and community.
Film by Brooke Stevens
Accompanying text:
The seas carry us. They always have.
Through deep time. No time. All time.
I carry her with me.
In the sinew. My skin. Our blood.
A wailing hidden in the muscles of my chest.
Seven bodies hang. Seven lifetimes of experience. Hang.
Heavy with grief, weighted with longing. Fractured by traumas held.
A bodily knowing. Compounded by seven.
They call to me, in awake dreams.
A returning.
Triggering ruptures.
The loss and lostness leftover.
Knowledge holding.
A returning.
