Toolangi

                                                           
2017
commissioned by FELTspace for FELTdark;
solo presentation at Trocadero.
           For this work I collaborated with visual and sound artist Lauren Abineri to create the soundscape.

Toolangi, interrogates the constructed human concept of a ‘natural’ environment. It aims to examine the relationship between the positive physiological and emotional feelings elucidated by placing oneself within such non-urban environments and the ever present, sinister feelings and awareness of so-called Australia’s Black history and being present on stolen land.

The artist places themself within the densely vegetated backdrop to engage with artistic and literary tendencies to gender landscapes via bodily descriptors. Toolangi is an attempt to subvert the established associations and imagery surrounding ‘nature’. Simultaneously, they wishes to highlight the performative notions of gender as projected on to their own body.

Filmed on the traditional land of the Taungurung people of the Kulin Nation, this work exists within the deep seeded politics of a settler-colonial unsovereign climate.