Air

The invisible subject Daniel Browning Air is the invisible subject — as curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow presciently remarked to me. Generally speaking, air is not observable, and there are few reference points in Australia’s Indigenous languages for this precious and life-giving shared resource essential to human existence. Omnipresent, the invisible subject was mysterious and unknowable. Yet the Ancestors observed it in the wind that moved the trees, in the dust storms that swept across the claypans and in the smoke as it rose from our fires. In the north, they heard it in the low-frequency drone of the yidaki, the world’s oldest wind instrument, and in the whirring of the bullroarer, which in southern Australia summoned men to ceremony. They also breathed it in the oral literatures of our languages, embodying its force and subtlety. The invisible subject is also deeply present in the Indigenous modernisms practised by d Harding, Yhonnie Scarce and Jonathan Jones. Air, or the exhalation of the breath, is a crucial element in the work of Harding and Scarce, who both practise a mouth-blown technique to create their installations. In Harding’s case, the artist is performatively enacting a ritual (sometimes with the use of an atomiser) with members of their family in situ in a gallery context to produce images which they describe as ‘illustrations of my breath’. Their work conveys the cultural and visual practice of successive generations of their matrilineal Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal ancestors, who left their trace in ochre in a remote sandstone escarpment in the highlands of central Queensland, which rise and arc through Bidjara and Garingbal Country. Like the articulation of our unspoken languages once defined as ‘moribund’, blowing ochre is an embodied process in which the pigment must be ingested as far as the mouth cavity and expelled with great force to produce an afterimage — the shadow. Yhonnie Scarce / Cloud Chamber 2020 (installation view, ‘Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce’, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Vic. 2020) 71 The invisible subject