Kim Ah Sam 
Kalkadoon/Kuku Yalanji people
Born 1967, Meanjin/Magandjin/Brisbane, Australia
Lives and works in Tulmur/Ipswich, Australia

For the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial, Kalkadoon/Kuku Yalanji artist Kim Ah Sam has produced a suite of works that engage with weaving as a site of abstraction. Ah Sam invokes both traditional and contemporary weaving techniques with unpredictable intrigue; her weaving is led entirely by intuition and is singular in the sense it cannot be readily explained or reverse-engineered. 

Around a conic structure — taken to represent towering termite mounds found throughout the region — the artist weaves strands of natural and dyed raffia to mimic the snaking, twisting and meandering landscape. Her weaving refers at once to hills, tracks and rivers, but also to arteries flowing throughout the body. Around the base of each work floats a buoyant plume of emu feathers that recall the traditional emu footprint boundary markings of Battle Mountain, a massacre site that today holds painful memories of the Kalkadoon Wars (1870–90).