Gallery-represented artist Kim Ah Sam (Kuku Yalanji/Kalkadoon) explores the connection between Country and the human body through woven sculpture.  For Melbourne Art Fair’s BEYOND sector, Kim has produced Our Country, a constellation of sculptures which gently hover and spin, possessing a kinetic quality.

Ah Sam’s self-taught weaving process is intuitive and improvisational, with no preordained pattern. Repurposed materials such as raffia are sourced from zero waste outlets, while emu feathers gesture towards the territorial boundary markings of her Kalkadoon ancestors who have maintained culture since time immemorial.

The woven surfaces of Our Country braid together connection to Country and embodied knowledges. Tracing journeys both physical and biographical, they resemble aerial cartographies and bodily systems such as skin, veins, and arteries. Ah Sam’s conical forms recall termite mounds in Cloncurry and the topographical landmark of Mount Isa in north-western Queensland, a mining region on Kalkadoon lands and the site of violent settler-colonial frontier wars in the late 1800s.

Ah Sam’s production process is therapeutic, imbued with her experience as a postnatal councillor for new Indigenous mothers, providing care and support despite trying circumstances. The negative voids and hollows in Our Country become analogous with the ruts and black holes in life, lost knowledges and cultural estrangement, while entwined fibres allude to social bonds and the ties that bind communities together.