D Harding: Places

A bed sheet is folded then unfolded. Folded again here and ingrained with dirt and haptic urge. It is with folding, dirt, and touch that D Harding’s Places, a series of earth paintings, brings an extraordinary quality of attention to the specific textures, colours, and the composition that gives form to a felt coherence of the land. Harding works the ground of an Indigenous mutuality, so that what we call Country might be realised (if only partially) as collective material breath.

A gentle progression of six large linen bed sheets is nailed to the gallery wall. A seventh sheet remains folded – approximating the size of a dossier envelope – held together with a bulldog clip. The textile is painted in earth tones and grouped into three subtly distinct arrangements titled Places i, Places ii, and Places iii. Together with a vitrine containing soil samples (the dirt and sediments that the artist has mixed with acrylic binder to make paint), these new paintings comprise D Harding’s Places at Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) on Wiradjuri Country in Bungambrawatha – a place known in settler-colonial terms as the New South Wales border town of Albury.

The border is a crease in the settler-demarcation of space, whereas folding in Harding’s art presents a different way of understating land. It is a presence and a device in the paintings, telling a formal story about the mutable conditions of surfaces and interiority, and of the non-oppositional interplay between energies. It is also a story of an embodied crease in the social fabric; about affect – an inward turn that is at the same time an index of an outward relationality. The artist, who is a descendant of Bidjara, Ghungalu, and Garingbal peoples, has previously used folding to make and transport their work. Take for instance the wool felt in INTERNATIONAL ROCK ART RED (2021–2022), whereby the surface of a wool blanket is rubbed with ochre and gum Arabic, folded and shipped in a vacuum-sealed bag to Paris, where it was then unfolded and exhibited. The wool felt remains a surface, but rubbed with ochre then folded, it is also a space of interiority and contact.

Writing on INTERNATIONAL ROCK ART RED, art historian Hilary Thurlow speaks of ‘the queer edges’ of D’s careful, collaborative mark-making. In Harding’s work, folding is not simply a closing-in but a reorientation, collapsing binary formations in an intimate zone of indistinct proximity. In this sense, it could be said that gender is a fold. With Places iii, red oxide has gathered in the lines made by the fold, a gesture enduring with soft presence, as the sheet is outstretched on the wall. These ‘queer edges’ are indebted to folding, as we are indebted to one another.

The faint grid that remains after each sheet is laid open carries a minimalist form towards local and material particularity. Though seemingly abstract, the paintings are very specific about language and space. Each painted panel consists of an expansive field of colour free from any gestural trace. Dirt and sediment appear to have been ingrained in and upon the sheets, which retain the ghostly but mechanically precise impression of the grid that was made when the sheet was originally folded and packaged for distribution. Four of the paintings correspond to significant locations on Wiradjuri Country and are embedded with soil and sediment from each site. The remaining three are embellished with the deep red of commercial iron oxides.

In Places i, Wonga Wetlands soil names not only the medium and its location, but the cultural specificity of colour. The panel is coloured in tonal variations of brown, black and yellow: Wonga Wetlands brown, black, and yellow. Colour is always at the edges of intersubjectivity. And here, a deeply localised, material and collective relationship to colour is invoked. An uncertain proposition is made, confounding the proprietorial claims that the naming of colour often entails, like Cadbury Purple or Barbie Pink.

Subtler than the grid that appears in each sheet is an allusion to racialising taxonomies, and to the way naming (of places) is bound up in Indigenous dispossession and settler-colonial concepts of property. Harding seems to want to complicate the way such notions have at times fixed Aboriginality restrictively in place and time.

Places is part of MAMA’s three season-long artistic program, nginha. A Wiradjuri term, which translates to ‘here’ in English, nginha derives from the eponymous poem, composed in Wiradjuri by renowned Wiradjuri poet, Aunty Jeanine Leane, which the author, academic and educator lets us know:

 “… asserts connection to Country for Wiradjuri people, First Peoples across this continent, and for all people who move across this land, under its skies, and through its waterways.”

A similar tendency animates Harding’s paintings in Places, recognising Wiradjuri being, time and place. The paintings openly address the viewer, drawing them into reflective relation to the terms of an Indigenous episteme – the realm for knowledge and what can be said or understood.

This episteme is relational; Harding often collaborates with family to make their work. With Places they broaden this approach, working with local community and Elders. As with all four panels painted with local pigments, the Wonga Wetlands painting was made with the support of Elders and the community, in this instance, Aunty Liz Heta (Wiradjuri) and Aunty Glennys Briggs (Tunguwurung/Yorta Yorta/Wiradjuri). Country, as we see it in Places, is visualised through relational process with Wiradjuri people.

All seven paintings might be thought of as renditions of the earth, displayed frontally on the wall, but grounded. With a subtle gesture – traditional square-cut flooring nails have been used to fix each sheet to the wall – the architecture speculatively oscillates between the vertical and horizontal planes. This manoeuvre, which is pulled off through the literal use of the ground in the paintings and the conceptual nailing to the ‘floor,’ summons the long history of Aboriginal ground painting, including traditional sand drawing and Western Desert acrylics.

Inherited ancestral styles are a consistent concern in Harding’s work, such as Wall Composition in Reckitt’s Blue (2017), which recalls naturalistic rock art. Here, the artist uses a process they’ve referred to as ‘emetic painting,’ spitting or blowing pigment onto the wall to stencil the outlines of shovels and other tools in Reckitt’s Blue – a synthetic ultramarine. Though they approach Places with a different process, there is in both works a consideration of how visual-tactile signs – tools or simply colour – might operate as a (more than) sufficient alternative to phonetic writing.

Here, the question of colour as property arises from Harding’s use of materials and pigments, like Reckitt’s Blue laundry whitener. In one regard, this can be taken as an oblique echo of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s (Goenpul, Quandamooka People) conception of the ‘white possessive’ in her 2015 book, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Moreton-Robinson’s concept is a key intellectual intervention in critical Indigenous studies, which names the structuring logic of settler-colonialism through which whiteness secures and naturalises ownership and hegemonic power over Indigenous land and over knowledge, institutions, and subjectivation.

Wall Composition in Reckitt’s Blue and Places bring histories of art and aesthetics into relation with those of Indigenous sovereignty, dispossession and racialised exploitation. Reckitt’s Blue was a popular laundry product across the colonial ‘frontier’ in Queensland (and across the Southeast, including Wiradjuri Country) in the late 19th century. Some of the main tasks of indentured Aboriginal women were washing and folding linens. Dr Jackie Huggins (Bidjara/Birri Gubba Jura) demonstrates this in her 1995 article ‘White Aprons, Black Hands: Aboriginal women domestic servants in Queensland’, detailing how discriminatory state legislation denied Aboriginal people the right to wages for domestic labour.

Harding isn’t playing off antagonistic material processes, the artist folds or re-orientates oppositional concepts like the ecological and the extractive in Places. The opposition, although friction might be a better term, is between the universal, as invoked in the title INTERNATIONAL ROCK ART RED and the local character of Indigenous history and experience, which materially unfolds in Places. In this sense, the artist seems to be invested in a mode of aesthetic emancipation. The gallery becomes a space for working out a configuration that embraces the possibility of Indigenous principles that can withstand the threat of appropriation, which is a proposition for internationalism without the totalising or singular claim.

Such work attests to the discrete and durable quality of Indigenous culture while avoiding an impulse to reduce indigeneity to singular meaning or fixed identity position. Whether it is the formal device of the fold, the material presence of the bed sheet or the gallery infrastructure that surrounds and supports the paintings, Places unfolds in an optative mood. This work reorientates the relations to colonial and capitalist enclosure. In Places, art – no matter how minimal, formal, abstract – is folded into relations of land, flesh, and property.