Tracking histories and exchange through small matter- Inside the art of D Harding

In Matter as Actor, you use both white ochre pigment from Central Queensland and a yellow pigment bought from a store in Sweden. Something that struck me about this was the emphasis on the latter being store-bought; is this way of describing the materials you’re using here a continuation of Reckitt’s blue you’ve used for previous exhibitions?

One of the things that is really necessary, particularly presenting ourselves in both an Australian local context, but also internationally as Aboriginal people, is to be so precise in language and description – because a lot of my intention is to write into the record. So it’s crucial for me to identify the specific language group, and that is, for example, Garingbal white ochre, which [people from that community will know] specifically where that is [from] and the whole story around it. In the same way, identifying the store-bought pigment is just as important because I’m trying to catch [out] lazy assumptions.

With previous exhibitions, you have created work in the space of the gallery itself - such as carving the gallery wall at the Queensland Art Gallery in a manner that recalls and draws upon engravings at Carnarvon Gorge. With that in mind, I was interested to hear your thoughts on how you approach a gallery space, and the importance of site-specific work? 

I work to encourage [family members] to think about art spaces in the same way that our bodies and our family are familiar with being in the ancestral sites in the landscape. It took me a while to get to this point, but two colleagues in Brisbane [Merindah Donnelly and Warraba Weatherall], two Aboriginal people in the arts, helped me understand that I was looking at the white cube, or the museum space, through an Aboriginal lens. And so, my family can walk into a space, if I can encourage them to feel safe, if we all can encourage them to know that their cultural knowledge is important here.

You mention the importance of approaching the gallery setting in a way that family members can come in and feel safe. In that sense then is the gallery a kind of middle ground to share a cultural heritage without it being damaged or intruded on? 

It's a constant negotiation for me personally, and with the colleagues that I’m working with. We probably all agree that, historically and still [to this day], there are many barriers that make museum spaces and contemporary art spaces unsafe for all sorts of different communities and people. Do I think the gallery is a safe third space? We're getting there. I'm only one practitioner, but I understand that lots of other conversations are still drawing attention to the clear boundaries and barriers and processes which makes people unsafe.

One of the things that I really try to do is to familiarise my family with these places. As Bidjara, Ghungalu or Garingbal people in Central Queensland, [we don’t] have many chances to practise and live our cultural inheritance in the landscape. And that's largely why I came to work in the museum space - so we can be doing it for ourselves and for each other. Through that, my family have developed more of a sense of safety and deep familiarity with contemporary art galleries. One of the ways of [creating safety] is to recognise that, even though there’s lots of cultural knowledge in here, it’s also quite distinct from what you might find in the landscape. It is contemporary art. We're still present as contemporary people, and our inheritance is still here.

As an artist incorporating the processes that you’ve been taught by family members into your practice, has the way you think about those processes changed over time?

I started off wanting to be involved in cultural making as a young person and I took up making paintings that might be considered “tourist art” (we weren’t selling to tourists, but it had that kind of format). We were making them for ourselves, not even to be exhibited, but we were drawing on some of those tourist art conventions. Some of the ways of making that I’ve brought into museums I will no longer do. Spectatorship - that belongs to us, and some of those forms, like spraying ochre on the wall using my mouth, is not something that I’ll do readily anymore. We’ve had more opportunities [in the gallery setting] and now, more family members have [learned the] skill in being able to work with [certain] materials and embody [cultural] processes, and so then that belongs to us again. I've needed to shift and recalibrate what I might present, again looking at safety, constantly asking questions about what I might be exposing or revealing.

Finally, I wanted to ask about how you see your work - whether as a reproduction of cultural processes, or a continuation, a conversation, or through a framing like that?

I learned the semantic distinction between “re-” and “de-” prefixes when I was doing my postgraduate research. And “re-” and “de-” words, in terms of the First Nations context in Australia, were really crucial - like revival, reawakening, decolonising. But someone pointed towards the fact that re- and de- we’re still prioritising a position we don’t want to be in. So, to decolonise is to prioritise the colonised position. So I’ve completely wiped them out of my head now. Our family now has the approach that [the land] was taken from us. Or, it’s the first time that I’m getting to [use cultural ways of making]. In terms of the making, the knowledge bases are still enough intact that it's just our first time: we're just doing it now.