Autumn Exhibitions Opening Night 

Jill Noble, The Journey, 1990. Oil on linen. Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection, Donation from the Bank of Melbourne Regional Art Collection through the Taxation Incentives for the Arts Scheme, 1997.

Image description: Colourful triptych painted in a naïve style of a landscape with urban development, farming activities and a railway meandering across the foreground. The blue sky has an angel figure floating above the rooftops.

Opening night performance

They Carried Soil Under Their Nails is a new performance work by artist Kiera Brew Kurec. Over the duration of 45 minutes, six performers gesture to the cycles of seasons, time, familial history, colonisation and displacement.

The performance explores how inherited histories imbue physical action. Braided wheat serves as a central motif, alluding to both traditional braided hairstyles and the structure of DNA, symbolising the transmission of trauma through matrilineal lines.

The black charcoal holds multiple references including the concept of Chernozem (Ukraine’s fertile “black earth”), the Holodomor (death by hunger 1932-1933), the Soviet Union’s scorched-earth policy, and the ongoing and current colonisation and destruction of Ukrainian land. It addresses the global ripple effects of this destruction—including the current weaponisation of food security through the blockage of grain shipments.

The work is performed in close proximity to the decommissioned Hazelwood brown coal mine. Following their processing at Bonegilla, many migrants—including Ukrainians—were stationed in the Latrobe Valley to work at Hazelwood, contributing to the colonisation of Gunaikurnai land and waters, and the resulting environmental degradation of the area.

The work is a homage to erased and stolen histories, unspoken trauma and the cycles of history and how the landscape and the body are repositories for these memories.

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