NARETHA WILLIAMS
ARTIST
Art installations, exhibitions and works in progress.
Earth Fire Rain Wind
Earth Fire Rain Wind (Birrguu [bush] Weeyn Galiyn Girrarr in Wiradjuri language) is an installation work exploring the conflicts and truths of a Woman of Mixed Dreaming, influenced and inspired by both urban and natural realms. A Wiradjuri ‘half-caste' with English, Irish, Chinese bloodlines, she tackles identity, spirituality and the art of maintaining Earth dialogue in urban landscapes.
This video is a vision mix and features the 'Wind' soundtrack. It was performed live in inner city Melbourne.
Winner of the 2009 Indigenous Fringe Artist of the Year.
I AM - Indigelab Development Showing
A work in progress, this collaborative development showing was staged at Bundanon Trust NSW during an intensive Indigenous Art Laboratory 2011. Created in 24hrs. Composed and produced by myself, this soundscape also included my talented cousin Eric Avery on violin. Again working with ritual and identity, this time incorporating mark making in the form of live sigil work.
Shifter
This moving image work won a major prize at the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards 2011 and later exhibited at Carriageworks Sydney for the 2013 International Symposium on Electronic Art.
A life size projection, this ‘lo-fi’ film merges past and present while anchoring ideas of spiritual practice in a historical context. The work reflects aspects of self co-existing, each informing and experiencing the other – shifting and morphing, yet holding the same space, represented by the circle. The work highlights a capacity, and often a need to shapeshift in the world. In its broadest sense, shapeshifting is when a being has the ability to alter its physical appearance; cultivated, this becomes a skill and an asset, and allows for multifaceted expressions of authenticity.
Videos
Ghost from the SLIP Series
[silent]
This moving image work featured in the Picture This exhibition at Counihan Gallery Brunswick Vic 2012. It was presented alongside three large photographic prints.
The SLIP utilises self portraiture as a mechanism for claiming my identity, and geared to expose the viewer for their assumptions on the ‘authentic aboriginal’ or more broadly, the Authentic Self. In these images, time, culture, blood and earth bleed through, and are experienced simultaneously in the now. The works depict psychic memory, cross-dimensional landscapes and hinging paradigms.