Kuku Yalanji / Kalkadoon artist Kim Ah Sam maintains a multidisciplinary practice that includes printmaking, papermaking, drypoint etching and painting, but she has garnered particular attention for her sculptural weavings. In the genre of Aboriginal fibre art, Ah Sam’s weavings challenge conventional notions of form, shape and medium.

In this suite of ten works, Ah Sam recreates the natural formations and undulations of Kalkadoon Country. The artist weaves natural and dyed raffia around a conic structure – representative of the towering termite mounds found throughout this region – which mimics the snaking, twisting and meandering landscape. Her weaving refers not only to hills, tracks and rivers, but also to arteries flowing throughout the body. Country and the body are here realised as one.

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 the painful memories of the Kalkadoon Wars (1870–90). Having returned to her paternal Kalkadoon Country in 2016, Ah Sam’s intriguing and seemingly inexplicable forms reflect her weaving as an embodied act of cultural reconnection and restitution.