"Before and Beyond, Our Journey." Kim Ah Sam at the Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial.

By Elle Borissow

“Before and Beyond, Our Journey,” (fig. 1, 2024) is a fibre installation by Kuku Yalanji/Kalkadoon Aboriginal artist Kim Ah Sam, which addresses themes of indigenous sovereignty and identity. Interpreted as a woven exploration of Ah Sam’s journey across Country, the series functions both as symbolic motif and woven testimony, honouring the artist’s lineage, descended from a diverse and perpetually nomadic culture. As themes in this work, the continuity of Ah Sam’s heritage, and resulting ancestral connection to a cosmologically animate landscape, are essential in understanding “Before and Beyond.”

Figure 1: Kim Ah Sam, “Before and Beyond: Our Journey,” bamboo, wire, raffia, emu feathers. Various dimensions: 13 x 13 x 40cm, 26 x 30 x 52cm, 47 x 40 x 77cm, 52 x 45 x 106cm. Installation view, 2024/2025. At the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) for the Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial. Photograph: Vivien Anderson Gallery.

Tingling with fibrous undulation, the fleet of weavings hung in the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) for sixth Asia Pacific Triennial, held in Meaanjan/Brisbane. Suspended via translucent fishing wire within a large alcove, their elevated forms floated like a swarm of emu-fronned jellyfish – wafting gently with an animate kineticism. Enigmatic in their ambiguous raffia forms, the surfaces of “Detail 3” (fig. 2) swell and recede in honeycomb-esque net of organic hives. Ah Sam has described their surface texture as “a bird’s eye view” of Kalkadoon typography, where each protrusion evokes hills, and mountains; whilst the divets in her design recede like valleys or gorges. “It’s as if the surface of the land has a type of skin, and the land has rivers just like arteries and veins of the body. My sculptural weavings flow in the same way as the rivers interlace Country, or the veins run through the body allowing movement,” Ah Sam asserted in an interview with ACCA.

Figure 2: Kim Ah Sam, “Detail 3” (the largest sculptural weaving to the upper right) in “Before and Beyond: Our Journey,” bamboo, wire, raffia, emu feathers. Close section of installation view, 2024/2025. At the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) for the Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial. Photograph: The Author, 15th January 2025, 14:17.

[Please note, that for the purposes of this article I refer to the largest sculpture in fig. 2 as Detail 3, to differentiate it for the purpose of this discussion. This is not a title assigned by the artist].

Positioned in conversation with the rich tapestry of Aboriginal culture and Sovereignty in Australia, as an act of creation, Ah Sam’s weaving is culturally enlivened by the animate energies of raw natural materials she selects - which undergo a process of symbolic metamorphosis when deftly manipulated by her hand. Comprised of found materials, which Ah Sam discusses in terms of “reverse garbage,” her tactile manipulation can be seen supplemented by cultural histories and social memory. The result, a spiritually animate connection between the artist and her ancestral landscape. Weaving for Ah Sam is “all about Country and coming into the landscape.”  Each knot, can be therefore seen asserting a parallelism between the surface of our human-skins, and the humus surface of the earth’s.

The QAGOMA likened Detail 3’s conical roughness to a termite mound; though in light of the artist’s own reflections, we might also consider them an abstract symbol of our own flesh, which houses veins, is textured by wrinkles and scars – or accented by moles. Our shapes, reflective of the internal bones they drape. Similarly, every segment of “Detail 3” is suspended via bamboo “bones,” which support the structure of the interlacing raffia “veins” and “arteries.” Poignant in her material choice of a combination of natural and man-made fibres, the Vivien Anderson gallery has described Ah Sam’s technique as “a therapeutic practice towards a process of cultural healing.” Her examination of the landscape’s relationship to the body providing a tactile means to address “feelings of disconnection and reconnection with her Country.”

Natural fibres like the bamboo, raffia, and emu feathers Ah Sam uses are fundamentally ephemeral, vulnerable to decomposition from moisture, and usage. Their inevitable deterioration, when interlaced with the other manmade nylon twines Ah Sam repurposes, construct a metaphor for human interaction with nature. Having grown up in Meeanjan/Brisbane, apart from her homeland further North, Ah Sam recounts the poignant journey across Country she undertook as a mature aged woman when returning to Kuku Yalanji Country, which lit a “fire in [her] belly,” igniting a desire to share her weave, in participation with the fibre art traditions of her regional ancestry.

The complexity and inventiveness of Ah Sam’s technique – with its gaps – and spiralling forms, speaks to this knotty colonial history of violence and erasure. As a living tradition, Aboriginal Australians endure the wounds inflicted by colonial violence and attempted cultural erasures (ongoing) which have led to the partial loss of an ancient body of knowledge. As another potent material symbol, Ah Sam’s use of emu feathers embodies this strength, perseverance, and wisdom. Emus, Australia’s largest bird, are adapted to the landscape in their ability to roam the Outback, their feathers signifying the journey of life. Moreover, emu feathers also relate to “the territorial boundary markings of her Kalkadoon ancestors who have maintained culture since time immemorial.”

Across the ocean, in Algonquian languages, word endings connote whether “objects are animate (containing or embodying a creative life force) or inanimate,” which shifts human-centric perspectives on ‘personhood’ in the animate natural world, and encourages respect and participation within a web of reciprocity with the land. Potawatomi Professor of Botany Robin Wall Kimmerer recalls the complexity of “Learning the grammar of animacy” of her native tongue – yet applauds its animate impetus, endowing respect for the land, and encouraging our reciprocity with our Ki/Kin – where the ‘bay’ is a verb;  not a noun. Jeanie Bell, a Murris linguist from Meeanjan/Brisbane, says that similarly in Aboriginal languages, there is “certainly a strong parallel between land and language.” As a primary receptacle of indigenous knowledge, Aboriginal languages have “experienced a deliberate and cultural genocide;” the active erasures and repression of Aboriginal communication and lifestyle enforcing colonial assimilation, and the loss of much indigenous wisdom. The majority of indigenous Australian languages (Pama-nyungan) are “agglutinating,” with pieces added to signify “tense, case, and access.” In weaving, Ah Sam could be said to reinstate a silenced animacy – that of the Kuku Yulanji language, and of Country – in every stitch.

The series “Before and Beyond, Our Journey,” navigates many slippery threads of human relationships to the land – where the human-body’s landscape is explored in tandem with the earth’s. By extension, Ah Sam’s weave maps her own personal journey, alongside a time Before, and a time Beyond our present moment. Her assertion of these themes in the medium of natural fibres, riddled with productive ambiguities, imbues a cultural versatility to a localised ecological message. Journeying both topographically across, and spiritually through an animated ancestral landscape, Ah Sam describes the Kuku Yulanji and Kalkadoon regions of Northern Queensland in her artistic process. Bursting with biodiversity and dependent upon fragile, reciprocal ecosystems, the Kalkadoon region sees saltwater meet tropical rainforest. Though harsh, it is far from inhospitable; rather, it relies deeply on Kimmerer’s notion of complex webs of reciprocity for the survival of a community of beings. In response, as an act of animate creation itself, weaving and woven art-objects come to fill these “gaps” in indigenous wisdom, created by colonial dispossession of Aboriginal land. “Before and Beyond: Our Journey,” takes root in the ancestral realm, yet its modern buds bloom through medial metamorphoses. A fruitful fabrication of cultural regeneration.

Bibliography:

ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art) “Artist talks: Kim Ah Sam, Teelah George, Joel Sherwood Spring and Salote Tawale,” 42 min episode. https://soundcloud.com/acca_melbourne/artist-talks-kim-ah-sam-teelah-george-joel-sherwood-spring-and-salote-tawale

Bell, Jeanie. “Australia’s Indigenous Languages,” in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michele Grossman, Melbourne University Press, 2003.

Gilchrist, Stephen. “The Presence and Promise of the Ancestors: Spirituality in Australian Aboriginal Art,” in Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art, Yale University Press, 2018.

Kim Ah Sam’s website https://kimahsam.wixsite.com/mysite/about

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 5x15 Robin Wall Kimmerer at Kew, lecture series at Kew Gardens, 29/05/2024.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, Penguin Books, 2003.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance, Penguin Books, 2024.

Mclean, Ian. Double Nation: A History of Australian Art, Reaktion Books, 2023.

Mclean, Ian. Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art, Reaktion Books, 2016.

Melbourne Art Fair Webpage, https://melbourneartfair.com.au/beyond-2025/

Moon, Diane., ed./curator. Floating Life: Contemporary Aboriginal Fibre Art, Queensland Art Gallery, 2009.Racette, Sherry Farrell. “Stitching Sovereignty in Contemporary Indigenous Art,” in Art Journal 2, vol. 76 (Summer 2017): 114-123.

Racette, Sherry Farrell. “Looking for Stories and Unbroken Threads: Museum Artifacts as Women’s history and Cultural Legacy,” in Restoring the Balance: First Nations Women, Community, and Culture, edited by Eric Guimond, Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, and Madeline Dion Stout. Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba Press, 2008. https://hdl-handle-net.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/2027/heb34635.0001.001. EPUB.

Thomas, Nicholas. “Landscapes: Possession and Dispossession,” in Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture, Thames & Hudson, 1999.

Vivien Anderson Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art Webpage, Artist Bio ‘Kim Ah Sam.’ Accessed via https://vivienandersongallery.com/artists/kim-ah-sam/