Croft, Brenda
Description
3 x lead crystal, lost-wax cast, hammer stone axes x 3 on Coreten steel bases, with internal lights; displayed as a triptych installation on wall.
Artist statement
The lead crystal stone axes cast during my CGW residency draw inspiration from the original material cultural object that found me (not the other way around) on my people’s country during site visits with Gurindji elders and community members back in June 2014.
The act of walking country, planting one foot in front of the...[Show more] other, breathing in, breathing out, rhythm and rhyme, walking memoryscapes, back through the timelines of the archives, through and on sites of contested cultural and physical territor(ialit)ies is painful yet soothing, revelatory while concealing, truthful yet unstable, reflecting the ground I that I have covered over the past quarter-century as I find myself continually back-tracking, circling. Every now and then events happen which underscore how I am always watched over and guided by my ancestors.
In June 2014, on a journey with senior custodians while documenting cultural sites, we stopped at a distant bore. Stepping out of the Troop carrier I had been driving, my eyes were drawn to the rocky ground beneath my feet. A cultural talisman caught my eye and bending down, I picked up the most stunning stone axe. My aunt, Violet Nanaku Wadrill, called out to me from another vehicle in our cultural convoy, so I walked over and handed the axe to her through the window.
That axe has become my version of a Venn diagram. Whenever I feel I am losing my way, in the archives, in my research, in creating work, I return to the object/artefact and the images I took that day—the stone was shaped and hewn by unknown hands at an unknown time, but I can feel their hands when I turn the axe over in my palm….
The solidity of the… stone axe make(s) me feel grounded, while at the same time it’ aesthetic presence is sublime…. We, those dispossessed from place, ceremony and kin, are like the fragments flaked from that ancient stone tool, quarried from our homelands. We are all chipped from that same solid piece of rock, with some of us still making the long journey home, wherever and whatever that may be.
The colours of the lead crystal, red, white and black, reference corporeality – blood and skin colour, a sliding scale of authenticity and eugenicist classification. The black axe is solid, soaking up and also blocking light, lit from behind a red gaffer lead crystal opaque screen. The red and white gaffer lead crystal axes are translucent, like skin, when lit from behind. All three suggest breath/e and heart/beats, while remaining resolute, solidly grounded.
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