Mandy Quadrio is a Trawlwoolway/Tasmanian Aboriginal woman, also of European heritage. Her exhibition Kukunna Wurraweena features an austere forest of suspended steel-wool sculptures. This abrasive material has been gently worked by the artist, transforming it from a coarse tool into soft, yielding bodies and comforting shelters. The vulval and womb-like forms of the sculptures suggest generations of maternal comfort—a copse within which we might safely commune with the past, despite the colonialist attempts to scrub her and her people away. The exhibition title loosely translates as ‘holding the weight of silence’.

In Tugrannah: A Black Pause at the Beginning, Quadrio’s first moving-image work, we are presented with incandescent filaments igniting in brilliant flashes and streams. Their intricate paths intersect like neurons firing in the brain or stars streaming through the cosmos. The work passes us in moments of wild conflagration and silent darkness, transforming its fuel into dust. The soundtrack features the artist and her sister—who has since passed—singing and speaking to each other. Quadrio enters a dialogue with her sister, reaching into the past, bringing it into the present, inviting us to gather, sit, and stare into the fire.

Mandy Quadrio: Kukanna Murraweena is supported by the IMA Commissioners Circle, and Creative Australia through the Visual Art, Craft and Design Framework Funding.