Warpulyainthi is a site specific artwork in collaboration Rebecca Selleck that responds to the 2022 Biennial of Australian Art theme, Free/State. South Australia prides itself on being a ‘free state’ where no convicts were settled or used for labour. However, it was a colony built on the slave labour of local Indigenous peoples, including the Kaurna people where the Art Gallery of South Australia sits. Like many First Nations people, my family lineage is marked by this domestic slavery.

The Kaurna landscape images are overlayed with Kaurna motifs from the Kuri ceremony, representing the absent Kaurna bodies in the space and the continuation of culture through two and a half centuries of oppression.

The body of work is an important reminder of our past and its masked histories, as well as the strength of First Nation’s peoples and cultures.

We show our son the plants to eat, the birds in the trees, and the importance of land and place. This work threads through millennia, these brief centuries of destruction, and into a future that we're all making today.