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d harding / Australia b.1982 / We breathe together (detail) 2017 / Ochre, charcoal, Reckitt’s blue on glass / 12 panels: 22 x 542cm (overall) / The James C. Sourris AM Collection. Gift of James C. Sourris AM through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2019. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © d harding
d hardingWe breathe together 2017
Not Currently on Display
We breathe together features 12 glass panels, each coated in a separate pigment. Each surface is distinct in its texture and tone, signalling a breadth of available resources. The warm mustardy yellows, peachy salmon, damp whites, deep charcoal and rich browns were collected from a range of locations across three territories — Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal. However, the electrifying Reckitt’s blue — the laundry whitening powder introduced to the area sometime during the colonial frontier of Queensland — plants the work firmly within the era of early contact between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.
The work is loaded with histories of harding’s ancestral aesthetic traditions, trade, domestic servitude and genocide — ideas which they have explored at length in earlier works. In reflecting on painting practices within a museum context, harding was drawn to abstraction and minimalist painting. When interviewed by Louise Martin-Chew about influences for this body of work, harding replied:
Every one of the wall paintings I have done has been a study in learning my contemporary practice in a gallery context. The 11th Gwangju Biennale wall work was in stencilled natural ochres using a figure and other marks, and I realised monochrome had to come next in my colour palette. I thought I could just use depiction without figuration and I began looking at colour field painting.1
Endnotes:
1. Louise Martin-Chew, ‘Dale Harding discusses his incredible year’, Art Guide Australia, 28 September 2017, https://artguide.com.au/dale-harding-discusses-his-incredible-year, accessed February 2019.
d harding is a Brisbane-based artist who is connected to Central Queensland through their birth and childhood in Moranbah, and their ancestral lineage with the Bidjara, Garingbal and Ghungalu peoples.
harding is influenced by the galleries of rock art and natural spaces throughout their grandparent’s countries, which largely fall within Carnarvon National Park in Central Queensland. They are currently a PhD candidate at the Queensland College of Art, where they graduated with honours from the Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art program in 2013.
harding has employed a variety of techniques and mediums to investigate the lived experiences of their family, some of whom were removed from their ancestral country to Woorabinda reserve by the Queensland Government.