Matthew Harris

Matthew Harris (b. 1991) is an artist of European and Koori descent who lives and works on Yállabirrang Country in Naarm (Melbourne).

His recent paintings and sculptures have employed minimal serial abstraction in critique of the institutional theft of First Nations’ cultural objects and the broader violence of colonisation.

He creates sculptures embedded with familial narratives, often expressed through material choices and their histories. Harris frames difficult subjects with subtlety and humour, weaving protest and tenderness through his practice of disarming irony.

When viewing Harris’s works of art, audiences are confronted by the insignificance and the miraculousness of humanity, in the context of the scale and time of the universe.

Distant future and deep time sit side by side in Matthew Harris’s Big Time and Baparra-banarrak. The painting depicting a constellation that will appear 65,000 years into the future hangs below a suspended meteorite aged around four-and-a-half billion years. Through his use of ochre for the sky and possum tail on the meteorite, Harris distinguishes his ever-present conception of time as specifically Aboriginal.