wayi (to hear), 2023 is a large scale, monotype print installation commissioned by curator Jessica Clarke for the Between Waves exhibition at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne in 2023.
Artwork Title: wayi (to hear)
Artwork Date: 2023
Artwork Medium: tarlatan monotype on frosted perspex
Artwork Dimensions: 170 cm x 122 cm each
Artist Statement:
i have drowned here
in these waters
of brine
and salt
and preservation
The ancestors hang here. Float, suspended in the neverwhere and the everywhen.
A succession of experiences, of traumas, of attempted erasures. Those forced to sacrifice ceremony for survival.
Country holds a space for them here, will always know them. And I hold them here, in my sinew and my skin.
They cried that they needed healing in the only language I knew how to hear.
I took a piece of tarlatan, a cloth of care, of wound mending, and I threw it into the sea. The only place I’ve ever felt home.
I have pulled and pushed the tarlatan through our waterways, watched it breathe in the tidal inlets. Letting in the tannins from the mountains, letting out the brine. Swallowing the language of salt and blood-stained water.
I meet them here, in the intertidal drifts of the melukerdee and nuenonne. And I listen. Collecting knowledge of place, relearning a somatic language, growing a vocabulary of grief.
As I work the ink and salt-soaked tarlatan into each monotype, I embed myself here too, in these pieces the height of me, in this material, torn to my proportions. My muscles ache at the work being done. The narrative that imprints here shifts as I do.
Positive, negative.
Present, missing.
Floating, bound.
I walk amongst the hauntings of transgenerational communication.
My body remembers them.
Installation photos courtesy of Andrew Curtis.