Kim Ah Sam
Kim Ah Sam
Our Country 4
Raffia, emu feathers, bamboo, twine, 35 × 50 × 50 cm, 2025
Our Country 4 and 5, 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 these works 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.
Kim Ah Sam s represented by Vivien Anderson Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne).
Kim Ah Sam is a proud Kuku Yalanji and Kalkadoon woman born and raised in Queensland. Her printmaking and sculpture practice is based around her cultural and spiritual identity. Kim is a self-taught weaver, her work embodies storytelling and knowledge-sharing through unique sculptural forms which examine the landscape’s relationship with the body. Her work explores weaving as a therapeutic practice towards a process of cultural healing and a way to address feelings of disconnection and reconnection with her Country.