Air

(pp.74–5) Anthony McCall / Crossing 2016 (installation view, GOMA 2016) Cloud Chamber echoes the shape of the toxic plumes witnessed immediately after the detonation at the Breakaway site on 22 October 1956, the final test of Operation Buffalo. The ground temperature at Breakaway must have been infernal because the silica in the desert sand around the site reached its melting point, metamorphosing into glass. Scarce has visited Maralinga several times and has described how the crystallised sand crunches underfoot as you walk the site. Scarce’s pendant hand-blown glass forms are also produced in extreme heat, from powdered silica, in the so-called ‘hot shop’ at Adelaide’s Jam Factory. Suspended in the air according to a complex mathematical grid system designed by Scarce’s collaborator, interdisciplinary artist and architect Mikhail Rodrick, the forms move noiselessly and occasionally touch, producing a tinkle — a resonant acoustic note which always prefigures, for me, the misophonia-inducing sound of glass breaking. The collaborative work of Wiradjuri artist Jonathan Jones and Elder Dr Stan Grant Snr AM, untitled (giran) 2018, is a flocking murmuration of intersecting objects that evoke handmade tools, such as a stone knife (galigal), a freshwater mussel scraper (bindu-gaany) and a hardwood spear point (dhala-ny). Bound with handmade string and feathers and staked to the wall, the ‘tools’ appear to take flight in synchronised movement — as in the murmuration of birds — across a curved space. Jones has manufactured most of the ‘tools’ himself and galvanised a band of feather collectors in a collaborative artmaking practice, in a performance of the Wiradjuri ethos of yindyamarra, or mutual respect. untitled (giran) , exhibited at ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9, 2018–19) and acquired by QAGOMA, is complemented by a 48-channel soundwork featuring the voices of Wiradjuri speakers and interweaving other atmospheric sounds: wind, bird calls and breathing. Indeed, the Wiradjuri term ‘giran’ means wind (as well as fear or apprehension) and the work is the visual actualisation of a much wider research project undertaken with Uncle Stan Grant to develop a Wiradjuri philosophy of wind. As an oral literature, the language itself embeds a deep knowledge of Country, a relationalist ethos and a subjectivity or personhood that centres a Wiradjuri way of being — such is the restorative power of our languages. In the case of the Bidjara and Garingbal Ancestors who practised the artform in the gorges, overhangs and cliffs of central Queensland, it is the afterimage of highly prized but everyday cultural objects, such as weapons and tools, including the axe-like hunting boomerang (and hauntingly — in one instance — a rifle, presumably confiscated or surrendered during the undeclared war that raged across the sandstone belt). In articulating the breath, Harding’s ancestors created a permanent text that expresses their individual artistic intent and a collective identity through ritual performance, while staking a deep relationship to the Country they overwrite. They also affirm their presence — their contemporaneity. Harding has described how the reverence and care that circumscribes the practice has, at times, ‘petrified [their] hand’. As I remember it (H2) 2022, in which they collaborate with family member Hayley Matthew, breaches the gulf that disrupted the continuous practice of the artform while extending its reach to include women and their objects, such as their grandmother’s gami, or digging stick, in an empowered break with tradition. Kokatha and Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce also enacts a ritual in blowing glass to produce the lustrous elongated forms that mimic long yams, a bush food harvested by her ancestors across the vast inland in the north of South Australia. Her increasingly monumental work, including Cloud Chamber 2020, bears witness to reverberant acts of nuclear colonisation, the British atomic weapons tests conducted at Emu Field and Maralinga, which contaminated the air and — invisibly — saturated ecosystems with fallout as the wraith-like radioactive clouds moved silently across the Australian landmass. Kokatha Country abuts the area declared a prohibited military zone where the British, with the permission of the Australian Government — if not their full cooperation — tested their arsenal of highly experimental nuclear weapons between 1956 and 1963, at the height of the Cold War. (The earlier test site at Emu Field was abandoned on the basis that it was too remote.) The British also conducted hundreds of secretive ‘minor trials’ testing the reaction of certain nuclear components which ultimately generated more contamination than the major tests, codenamed Operation Buffalo (1956) and Operation Antler (1957). Scarce was born on Kokatha Country at Woomera (which in the distant Dharug language of the Sydney basin means ‘spear-thrower’), the closed town established in 1947 to service military personnel attached to what remains the world’s largest land-based weapons testing range 446 kilometres north-west of Adelaide. 73 72 The invisible subject The invisible subject