Tess Mehonoshen

Master of Fine Art

Almost a decade after leaving my family home, I collected and removed a sizeable amount of red clay from our then-property in Cootharaba, Queensland, located on unceded Gubbi Gubbi lands. In the face of permanent separation and loss, I was attempting to retain a physical connection to this land of personal significance. Over the next seven years, I inexplicably continued to carry and displace the clay across vast distances, unable and unwilling to part from it.

My practice reveals the shifting emotional burden of my protracted, careful carrying of place. Using a laborious process of repetition, my haptic interactions with the clay facilitate and reveal a gradual emotional understanding of my non-Indigenous place-attachment through an introspective revisiting of internalised, fragmented memories.