In To know and possess 2021, Warraba Weatherall memorialises ten cultural artefacts, including the human remains of three ancestors held in national and state galleries around Australia. Weatherall has cast the original museum labels as individual bronze plaques, foregrounding these museological and anthropological collections as the repositories for his Kamilaroi ancestors’ physical and cultural heritage.

These commemorative-style plaques honour the objects and list their method of acquisition and categorisation, while raising questions about the circumstances of their removal from Country. Through them, Weatherall critiques the institutions that seek to ‘protect’ such objects by keeping them in ‘secure’ environments, which has simultaneously kept them from their intended uses, and from the descendants of their makers.