Robert Andrew

Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people whose Country is of the Broome region of the Kimberley, Western Australia. His practice explores the intersection of technology, language, and culture, often incorporating mechanical devices, natural materials, and digital processes to reveal hidden histories and challenge dominant narratives. Andrew’s art investigates erasure and reclamation, particularly focusing on the suppression of First Nations languages and cultural knowledge.

About the work

One element of Andrew’s work in the Biennial, old Country – Nagula and Country, is a video that was shot south of Crab Creek in Broome in the tidal flats. The aerial video was captured using drone footage creating a texture and graduation of the landforms that appear like thin parallel streaks. A single word in repetition interrupts the field of view: ‘Nagula’ (meaning saltwater in Yawuru language), written in water in the orange dirt of an unsealed road. Andrew achieved this by packing drums of water and water pumps on to the back of ute, using the vehicle to write the onto the bone-dry dust with water. In this way, the text and the space between each word become pauses or breaths, calling on us to read the Country. A brushed aluminium arm with pieces of charcoal attached is fixed to the back of the monitor. As it moves, the video appears to draw black parallel lines to the wall, seemingly mirroring the lines on the screen.

‘Ground, Earth, Sand, Time and Space is a plinthlike compact rectangular prism of soil, which collapses slowly as a mechanism pulls a string from its centre. Technology is already shaped by the hand and the land, an aspect that can be discerned in the stutter and lilt of Andrew’s machines, which are now recognisable as kinaesthetic rather than simply kinetic. They do not just move; their movements are informed by the artist’s tactile understanding and movement in Country.’

Text by Tristen Harwood, Yield Strength Catalogue

In Robert Andrew’s work, Country takes elemental form (charcoal) literally inscribes itself, draws itself across the walls of the institution to defy erasure. Andrew’s work confronts settler, industrial and technological colonisation of Country by marking and claiming space. His fragile, fugitive charcoal inscription is poignant and political. Landscape is a construct. Country is eternal. We are not to lose sight of or feeling for the earth on which we stand, of which we are all a part, and the horizon before us, full as it is of portent and possibility.

Text by AGSA Director, Jason Smith