Dangerous stars honours the lives of rabbits, birds, spiders, and the spectrum of other species with whom we share this planet. It draws on my personal experience of Country while tracing my fami-ly’s ancestry. Arising from my deep ties with Bpangerang people, from whom I am descended, and Warl-piri friends who’ve walked with me over the decades of my search.
Underpinning all these works is the conviction that a shared lan-guage with Country is not only possible but vitally important. By shared language, I refer to genuine acts of understanding between individuals and the land that sus-tains them.
Dangerous stars presents afterlife portraits of nonhuman beings as-cending and descending between earth and space. I placed corpses on light reactive paper, using a technique of my own devising, called Lumachrome glass printing. The series layers alternative pho-tographic practices, such as lumen printing (sun printing), cliché-verre and chemigram, with drawing and painting. I harness decomposition chemistry to create complex colour and detail. I exposed each print for 30 to 50 hours in natural light. Because most materials are found in the landscape, I consider these works as collaborations with Country.
Judith Nangala Crispin is a visual artist and poet living in the NSW Southern Tablelands and a descendant of the Bpangerang people of the Murray River. She has published two collections of poems and images, The Myrrh-Bearers (2015) and The Lumen Seed (2017) and is a member of Oculi collective. Judith’s work is held in private and public collections across Australia and internationally.
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