Alana Harris at Belco Arts. Photo: Andrew Sikorski.
At the Belconnen Arts Centre, five exhibitions have opened that celebrate First Nations culture, identity and connection to Country. They feature the Yawarj Mara Young Men’s Group, Alana Harris, Leilani Dewis, Corella & Crow and Richie Allan.
I think that it was the inaugural director of the National Portrait Gallery, Andrew Sayers, who first argued that a landscape could be interpreted as a self-portrait when made by a First Nations artist.
It represented a bond with the Country and served as a carrier of identity, much like a traditional articulation of facial features.
Alana Harris’s exhibition My Country, My Connection – Full Circle consists of 26 black-and-white photographs of landscapes with which she has a personal and ancestral association. In a way, they define her identity.
Alana Harris, Full Circle 1. Photo: Belco Arts.
In her artist’s statement for this exhibition, Harris writes, “As a First Nations woman, I have been fortunate enough to live on both my Grandmother and Grandfather’s countries for most of my life.
“I am a very proud Ngunnawal and Wiradjuri woman who is now fortunate enough to live on beautiful Yuin Nation country, a place my mother lived for the last 20 years of her life while maintaining her traditional connection to our homelands.
“These three connections are full circle for me.”
Harris was born in Penrith, NSW, in 1966 and is from Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal country. She grew up in Cowra, NSW, with her Indigenous Australian mother, who was of the Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal people, and her non-Indigenous father, who was from Penrith.
After completing her Higher School Certificate, she moved to Canberra in 1984, where she received a traineeship in photography at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) and commenced a Diploma of Arts (Photography) at the Canberra Institute of Technology in 1985.
Alana Harris, Full Circle 2. Photo: Belco Arts.
She participated in the After 200 years project in 1987 and was employed as Senior Photographer at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies.
She has been involved in numerous exhibitions, has received several honours and awards, and has been very active in the Canberra art scene.
The photographs that Harris is exhibiting at Belco Arts are beautifully evocative of place.
In some, including Full Circle 1, there is a slab of bushland, but most are beautifully observed fragments of rocks, water and reflections of the sky, as in the fabulous and powerfully evocative photograph, Full Circle 2.
Alana Harris, Full Circle 4. Photo: Belco Arts.
Harris has the rare gift of separating the individual elements of a landscape, such as the movement of water over rocks, and imbuing these elements with a spiritual dimension. Her photographs, Full Circle 4, Full Circle 10 and Full Circle 11, all have a meditative and mystical presence. She captures not so much the topography of a place, but its spiritual presence.
Alana Harris, Full Circle 10. Photo: Belco Arts.
Harris not only declares a sense of place in her work but also explores its spiritual identity, which holds unique significance for her. Many landscape photographers come to observe, discover and explore. Harris is not a tourist in the landscape, but a local who identifies with her Country and offers the viewer brief insights into why this is her Country and why it is sacred.
Alana Harris, Full Circle 12. Photo: Belco Arts.
My Country, My Connection – Full Circle, Alana Harris, is at Pivot Gallery, Belconnen Arts Centre, 118 Emu Bank, Belconnen. It’s open Tuesday to Sunday, from 10 am to 4 pm. It closes on 23 August.
