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

Robert Andrew’s work old Country – Nagula and Country is a video filmed on the tidal flats south of Crab Creek in Broome. Captured using drone footage, the aerial perspective reveals subtle textures and gradations in the landscape, which appear as thin, parallel lines across the surface of the land. Repeated throughout the video is the word ‘Nagula’, meaning saltwater in Yawuru language. The word is written in water onto the orange dirt of an unsealed road. Andrew created this by transporting drums of water and pumps on the back of a ute and using the vehicle to carefully write onto the dry ground. The repetition of the word, and the spaces between each instance, function like pauses or breaths, inviting viewers to slow down and read the Country.

Attached to the back of the video monitor is a brushed aluminum arm holding pieces of charcoal. As it moves, the arm appears to draw black parallel lines directly onto the gallery wall, echoing the lines seen in the video. Nearby, Ground, Earth, Sand, Time and Space takes the form of a compact rectangular block of soil that slowly collapses as a hidden mechanism pulls a string from its centre. Together, these works highlight Andrew’s interest in the relationship between technology, the body and the land. Rather than functioning as smooth or automated machines, Andrew’s kinetic works move with pauses and irregular rhythms, shaped by the artist’s physical engagement with Country. In this way, the works suggest that technology can be informed by place, touch and lived experience, rather than operating separately from the land.

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