Dr Virginia Keft, matjam bagin tja (Flying Fox in the twilight) [detail], 2023. Courtesy the artist.

Guruwa gunya (gum tree home)

Dr Virginia Keft

Gallery 1

Roomsheet

Guruwa gunya (gum tree home), is an immersive solo exhibition of new work by muruwari artist, Dr Virginia Keft. The exhibition invites audiences to an experiential and sensory encounter that blends concepts of Country and the natural world of the Australian bushland, with the domestic and urban space of ‘home’. The exhibition incorporates installation, painting, assemblage, weaving and textiles.

As a muruwarri woman, artist, and single mother living in suburban Dharawal Country beneath Geera (Mt Keira), the works in the exhibition speak to ‘home’ in multiple senses.

As a child I learned to sew by watching my mother; a skilled seamstress she whirred her work into existence as I sat on the messy floor of the sewing room. I learned to cook by watching her mix and taste, sprinkle and mix. Occasionally pushing spices under my nose, ‘can you smell which one this is?’ My grandmother, patient, soft and loved by her many grandkids, made Johnny Cakes, thick with golden syrup. A childhood enveloped in Saltwater Country where the mountains meet the sea; a long way from the red-earth, wide, dry spaces of the muruwari people and Granny Shearer’s stories of the muddy Barwon River. In adulthood, I sat on the banks of that river and Baiame’s Ngunnhu and learned to weave. Our hands worked the fibres as the candy-pink-sky encircles our circle. The river birds ready for evening and the Eucalyptus leaves under me have pressed and imprinted on my bare legs.

The exhibition invites us to consider the multiplicity of the notion of home through the deeply personal urban Aboriginal experience of the artist:

I invite you into my home of three. Experience the crunch and crackle of the gum leaves and bark beneath your feet, breathe in the scent of Eucalyptus oil in the air, conjure the ethereal quality of Country at dusk. Look to the matjam getting ready to fly and consider the kinship bonds that keep them safe. Some of us are guests here, we are on Aboriginal land.

Dr Keft’s exhibition, Guruwa gunya (gum tree home), invites the viewer into the artist’s personal homage to home and Country. It hopes to encourage audiences to reflect on their own understanding of home, whilst acknowledging the deep connections that Aboriginal peoples hold with Country and place - connections that span time, distance, place, land, sky, and water.