Body of objects 2016

In Body of objects 2016, d harding offers replicas of Aboriginal artefacts belonging to the artist’s family, cast in silicone.

For harding, these replicas of spears, boomerangs and various forms of nulla-nulla, or clubs, evoke Aboriginal cultural objects taken from their makers by non-Indigenous collectors for display in museums and galleries. The artist’s reproductions slump over museum plinths in a surrealist manner, their dark forms often studded with nails and other metal embellishments.

In addition, harding interweaves non-Indigenous art-historical references with their own Aboriginal heritage. Their sculptures conjure the paintings of Salvador Dali, notably The Persistence of Memory 1931, and the artworks of Pablo Picasso and surrealist André Breton, who were each inspired by and collected objects from the Pacific, including Australia. harding critiques the fraught histories of material culture within institutions, and the way in which modernist artists fetishised these objects and their cultures of origin.