Aidan Hartshorn presents an ambitious body of work critiquing the procedures of institutional collection and storage of ancestral & cultural material. Working with stone located across Wolgal/Wiradjuri Country, Hartshorn vacuum seals each stone while referring to the ethnographic practice used to package Aboriginal “artefacts” uncovered during excavation works for construction of infrastructure. Utilising contemporary worked stoned as substitutes for ancestral cultural artefacts, Hartshorn critiques the ways his ancestral inheritance and other material has been removed from Country, catalogued, and contained within institutional collections. His installation challenges systems that reduce living cultures to archival objects, asserting instead that cultural knowledge from these removed belongings remain inseparable from Country, ongoing custodianship and continued practices.
