BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND COUNTRY
Robert Andrew
With thanks to Mabu Yawuru Ngan-ga for gifting Yawuru Language to this artwork and to Wurundjeri Elder Aunty Di Kerr for the generous permission to use Yawuru language on this Country.
How does the environment around you shape your communities’ cultural makeup, your language, direction of travel, and how you gather?
The land both informs and records lived experiences. Water pools, evaporates and streams over land – its gradual lapping and flow captured in the white mineral lines at its shifting boundaries. Combining natural elements with programmed machinery, Yawuru artist Robert Andrew’s work challenges the dominant Western-education assumptions of language use by articulating the complexities of ancient and enduring knowledge systems. Listen and watch this process as salt water and earthen red iron oxides slowly drip from above, building and dismantling a written word in Yawuru Ngang-na, the artist’s ancestral language.
Buru — everything around you that you can see from the earth to the sky and also time
Yawuru language is an oral and conceptual language that requires expansive discourse and emphasis on experiences, philosophies, ideas, abstractions, and connections. To truly understand a conceptual language is to know the land and experience its evolving form—to speak it brings Country into the vocal cords and into the bodies of the people—its resonance is held within the land it’s born from.
What will we leave behind?
Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people, whose Country is the lands and waters surrounding the Broome region, Western Australia. His work speaks to the past yet articulates a contemporary relationship to his Country. Andrew’s work often combines programmable machinery with earth pigments, ochres, rocks, and soil to mine historical and cultural events buried by the dominant paradigms of western culture.