In Life, In Death

In Life, In Death responds to the collective unrest experienced by Indigenous peoples, who bear witness to and are targeted by ongoing settler-colonial violence in Australia and across colonised lands globally. During its creation, moments of colonial rupture, including the failed Australian ‘Voice’ referendum, the artist’s Aboriginal mother’s heart failure diagnosis, and the genocide unfolding in Gaza, became interwoven threads within a broader continuum of historical and present-day violence. These seemingly disparate events of mortality and subjugation illustrate the interconnectedness of past injustices and their enduring influence on our collective trajectory.

This series confronts not only visible acts of violence but also the ongoing structural and social conditions that sustain racism and oppression, revealing the persistent and unyielding nature of settler-colonial harm. The work is rooted in a foundation of Indigenous collective consciousness as a quiet, resolute force that carries memory, resistance, and deep ancestral knowledge across generations.

The subtle presence of poetry, traced as tears across the face, forms an intimate and performative visual language. These faint lines register exhaustion and grief while holding space for quiet endurance and deep listening. In this restrained choreography, ancestral insight is not symbolic but embodied, carried through stillness, gesture, and breath.

The poem’s final line, “I scream back,” is deliberately withheld from the images. This act of withholding becomes both protection and refusal, a private declaration that resists the forces seeking to silence Indigenous voices. The work ultimately asserts survival not through spectacle, but through sovereignty over what is spoken, what is felt, and what remains unspoken.

Access the catalogue of In Life, In Death, along with the accompanying essay ‘How to Separate the Soul: An Essay in Three Parts’ written by Hannah Donnelly: HERE