Robert Andrew: The Mechanics of Language
VAULT talks to Robert Andrew about revealing lost languages as a process for revival and reclamation.
Image credit: Installation view Robert Andrew, Within an Utterance, 2022, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
Artist Robert Andrew builds machines that metaphorically retrieve language and ancient knowledges from the earth, melding natural materials of ochre, charcoal, soil, chalk and water with the Cartesian geometrical systems of mapping once pressed into colonial service by charting lands for imperial invasion.
Collaborating with Tasmania’s Pakana community for his series of new works – collectively called Within an utterance –
at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Andrew’s mechanical plotting system of finely weighted strings, rocks and charred bark on walls translates language
into movement.
Nearby, dripping water slowly erodes a large compacted rectangular block of soil and ochre, the landscape forever adapting to pressure and reinvention – like speech itself, like the ongoing process of reviving Tasmanian Aboriginal language.
“It’s still at a sensitive spot of finding those words and understanding them and trying to place them correctly,” explains Andrew, who worked with Pakana curator Zoe Rimmer, Aboriginal linguistic consultant Theresa Sainty and cultural burning practitioner and Wakka Wakka
man Luke Mabb to understand Tasmania’s palawa kani tongue as a constructed one.
Research is currently underway to
verify different palawa kani words and cross-reference differing interpretations
of meaning. Based in a studio in Meanjin/Brisbane, Andrew collaborates often in his quest for strengthening Indigenous language and cultural knowledges, the
latter firmly embedded in the former.
Along with the exhibition at MONA, Andrew also has a large installation in the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony at the National Gallery of Australia, a writing machine called A connective reveal—Nainmurra guuruburrii dhaura (2022), which means ‘taking care of ceremonial ground’.
Over time, the machine works by slowly eroding an outer layer of chalk on a wall to expose that phrase – which Paul Girrawah House, son of Ngambri-Ngunnawal Elder...Subscribe to read this article in full
