custodian boots
2016
two screen video installation, 7minutes looping.
We’re growing into country. He and I both have skinny legs hanging out of short pants. And we wear boots. He has no socks showing. He leaves his boots at his Nanna and Pop’s place and wears them when he is here. His adolescent boots are getting too small: need to get another pair soon. R.M. Williams boots. I notice how he gently steers the younger kids – toward play, away from danger, to relate somehow with what else is going on with everyone else and everything here. And he follows his Pop around, picking up the way, listening in for a sense of it all. A call is felt and unspoken. A transmission is happening. So many bends in the river ahead. Access to country. Reclaiming language. Uptown life and this living Culpra country. Balancing ways. Time on country. The boot’s-eye view invites a shift in our perception: to the rhythm and gait of walking country; to the intimacy of the foot’s fall on land; to how it might be to constantly negotiate kinship and country in ever challenging circumstances. Perhaps we are always growing into country.
Video footage made with Nick Clark and the support of the Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation. Special thanks to Nick, Barry Pearce and Eddy Harris.
Commissioned by Interpretative Wonderings project,
exhibited at Mildura Art Centre, Feb 2016, and 107 Projects Sydney Nov 2016.