My name is Dale Harding. I'm an artist and I'm currently based in Brisbane
Queensland in Australia
This particular space is for playing and mucking around
I do a lot of play in here at night time. When the city is doing their kind of
social time and play time, often it's a really great space to come in and play in here
So yeah Friday and Saturday night in the studio is a delight
Particularly if you can hear parties and other things going on I go it's a good
place to be right here right now yeah
Within our family my mum is very skilled maker in many different media
forms, embroidery and quilt making, and textile work so I was present as a
little kid doing embroidery and cross stitch
My father's a non Aboriginal man
and a man of agricultural background and a real passion for trees as plants and
timber as a media and this is of great importance to who I am these days
because the sensitivity and the care and an awareness of environmental presence
comes to me for my father as well as my mum
So because of mum and dad, art and
media were just around me
My mother's parents: my grandfather was a Bidjara man and my grandmother was a
Ghungalu woman. I was witness to the burden of the silence that was with my
my grandmother and our broader community in being refused recognition and being
refused identification for who you are; and certainly also for what your
experience has been under the colonial dispossession in central Queensland
'Bright-Eyed Little Dormitory Girl' is the work that I made in direct response
to or seeking to access the lived experience that my grandmother had been
describing to me of her girlhood being under the total control of the
Queensland Government of the time
The work consists of five very small
sacs, which were previously used for the trade of millet seeds and that's
important because the Aboriginal labour and Aboriginal lives were considered commodity
If the work doesn't relate to your family and your community then
what's the point
Two of my cousins have joined my art practice
They've met the art practice as their own cultural selves, as Aboriginal people
with also a South Sea Island connection
As untrained artists, they're stepping into
a space of contemporary art practice with their own cultural framework, which
enables them to make really sophisticated and thrilling, and
surprising decisions in the in the processes of making art
It excites me greatly for the contemporary art world
to be able to have these spaces which is
safe for cultural people to be themselves
I'm really fortunate as a
newer artist in this immediate community to be able to bounce in and
out of and share the space with the senior artists who were here
A number of years ago, I was asked the question: why has there been so much
innovation and movement in the Brisbane art making particularly among
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander makers? And we in the conversation
arrived that there's still something to push back against in the Brisbane psyche
> There's been a lot of inhumane activity acted on the land and how artists are
exploring that in their practices is looking at the importance of country and
what it means to both spiritually
belong but also be physically away from country to
I came to working on gallery walls and making studies on the studio
wall through an understanding that the landscape was the gallery
that my forebears, my ancestors knew and so working directly onto the gallery walls
was a deliberate acknowledgement and continuation of making story
painting stories onto the sandstone walls of the space
For how I look at my work and who
I am, nature and the landscape are there as kind of work languages and what we
understand is that the art practice and our cultural selves in central
Queensland and where we are is inseparable
In my grandfather's language
there's no word for love so to access a paradigm around
nature and the environment, if there's no necessity to describe love you just do
it, you just are, you just be it
Well then nature and landscape and environment are just part of who you are and what you do