Our Country 5

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.

“It’s as if the surface of the land has a type of skin, and the land has rivers just like arteries and veins of the body. My sculptural weavings flow in the same way as the rivers interlace Country, or the veins run through the body allowing movement.” – Kim Ah Sam

Kim Ah Sam s represented by Vivien Anderson Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne).