The primary goal was to create work in response to a site-analysis. The project was part of my MFA program at RMIT. “As I stood on the triangular patch of grass at the intersection of Fern Tree Gully and Dandenong roads, named The JW  Hurst reserve, I realised that this wasn’t just a manicured, beautified grassy patch, as it appeared. To me this is a memorial. And in every visit that followed, I could feel the stark contrast of the innocence of a suburbia as it sits on multiple layers of socio-political history. This very site was the meeting place for elaborate coroborrees of the Bunuwarrung language group of the Kulin nation people. They met, celebrated, camped and fished in the creeks nearby. A timeline stretching back 60000 years. The ground beneath me as I walked this patch of grass reverberated with new meaning. The time did shift irrevocably, the landscape morphing to include an insidious new tribe of people from far-away lands, who will pillage, plunder, squat, graze and build for themselves an empire over this very land. Post offices, trains, courts, churches, schools, missions, police quarters, highways, the advancement and disruption were relentless. They revealed to me, the myriad ways in which ancient cultures emplaced the nature-connect, in their co-existence. In this, I draw a genealogical parallel between the Indigenous culture of my adopted land and my native India. I wondered at how these civilizations entrenched their philosophies, encompassing spirituality, food, medicine and health, family, community, law, defence and barter trade. This assemblage references a “ritualistic offering”, a collection of everyday cultural materials. Small porcelain slip-cast lamps, unglazed exposing the clay body, bereft of all colour are steeped on a bed of dried leaves, sheltered in the shadows of a dead tree trunk on the banks of Scotchman’s creek that flowed in this site in bygone years, on what was called the Black’s Flat. The clay lamps, a jute bowl, and bark from paperbark trees growing in the area, often used by indigenous people to protect their babies as part of their “women’s business”, create a nest-like configuration. The red powder draws from the Indian tradition of the use of “Kumkum” which is powdered turmeric, slaked with lime, that turns it red. Using this powder as part of the installation subverts a traditional practice to allude to bloodshed and erasure of a culture and its people, that evidentially colours this site.” Gomathi Suresh, RMIT, 2021

Photography by Tharshiv Suresh I Scotchman’s Creek Oakleigh, Victoria