Kent Morris
St Kilda Foreshore Vaults
Image Description: Five Lorikeets perched in a row, in the metal gutter of a brick building. The row of birds is at an angle, and then reflected horizontally and vertically, forming a diamond shape. The brightly coloured feathers of green, orange and blue, and orange beaks and eyes, stand out against the muted tones of the architectural elements of the composition.
Unvanished - (St Kilda) Rainbow Lorikeet #2
📍 St Kilda Foreshore Vaults
Indigenous wisdom can illuminate the path to a sustainable future. Grounded by relationships to Country, family and culture, Indigenous people have survived oppression, genocide and several ice ages and other environmental crises. The opportunity to share these values and knowledge of Country can have profound and lasting effects on environmental justice.
— N'arweet Carolyn Briggs AM
Kent Morris, a Barkindji man, has selected the St Kilda Foreshore Vaults as the site of a major new public artwork in his ongoing Unvanished series. Unvanished – (St Kilda) Rainbow Lorikeet #2 (2022) is a four-panel photographic installation of local rainbow lorikeets transforming from black-and-white to full colour. In recent years Morris’s work has become iconic. He photographically reshapes birds in the built environment into vibrant, graphic images inspired by Indigenous designs and knowledge systems. His images contain repeated First Nations motifs that generate mesmerising and kaleidoscopic patterns, transforming an often-overlooked inhabitant of our built environment into a powerful symbol of Aboriginal sovereignty and identity.
This visual language can be deceptively simple. Its symmetry, for example, is an assertion of balance, in a world – ours – that has become profoundly imbalanced. ‘When the Europeans arrived, there was a sophisticated system of land management’ already in place, Morris explains, one that understood and respected ‘the interconnectedness of all things’. Reshaping imagery in his work is about reshaping our way of thinking and our relationship to the world. Jonathan Jones, a member of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations of south-east Australia, writes of Morris’s work, ‘As both object and country, these images speak simultaneously to the dichotomy of dislocation and unification present in our everyday lives. Undercurrents, shifts and chasms are pacified. The displaced are centred’.
The iconicity of Morris’s images is also purposeful – an aesthetic as well as political act of visibility. Or perhaps better, of making visible, of insisting on a way of being in the world that those of us who are settler-colonists would do well to pay more attention to. Choosing a high-traffic site like the St Kilda Foreshore Vaults, which face Jacka Boulevard, is another way in which Morris insists on visibility, again both aesthetically and politically. He photographed the rainbow lorikeets perched on the gutter of an apartment building in Wimmera Place, just behind the Vaults. Morris had often visited a home there, recently demolished, that teemed with birds, because the woman who lived there filled her yard with feeders of sugared water, attracting a colourful, cacophonous community of lorikeets.
Listening to Morris speak about birds is itself a transformative experience. He speaks eloquently and powerfully about how ancient, resilient and adaptable native birds are, and how sophisticated their forms of social organisation and communication are. The world’s songbirds, parrots and pigeons originated in Australia some 53 million years ago, and migrated outwards to populate the rest of the planet. For millions of years, then, they have cared for Country, played important roles in creation stories, and adapted to an increasingly inhospitable built environment, itself the product of a violent and dispossessing colonialism.
Visitors are encouraged to view the work from across Jacka Boulevard. Those who wish to experience it up close should approach the work from the Esplanade to the north-east of the site.—TM
References
N’arweet Carolyn Briggs, “Identity and Connection,” Overland 240 (Spring 2020), https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-240/feature-identity-and-connection/,accessed 27 April 2022.
Conversation with the author, 4 April 2022.
Jonathan Jones, “Kent Morris: A Sense of Balance,” in Tarnanthi 2021, exh. cat. (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2021), 144
Image Description: Thick and thin forms twist to produce a black typeface "a flight of birds arise from the concrete". Typography designed by Jinge Han.
Audio production by Simon Maisch. Supported by SIAL Sound Studios, School of Design, RMIT University
The following text has been commissioned to reflect upon and respond to Kent Morris, Unvanished - (St Kilda) Rainbow Lorikeet #2 at St Kilda Foreshore Vaults. The text is intended as a form of experimental wayfinding when engaging with the work.
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A flight of bright birds arise from the concrete
If you drive along the Esplanade or Jacka Boulevard they are almost invisible, easy enough to pass. It is only the painted, wood-panelled door with two padlocks that suggests another world existed here. Slow down, wind your window or better still find parking along the Boulevard and look closer.
A row of identically shaped arches is all that remains of the St Kilda foreshore vaults, which quietly blend into the infrastructure like they were never there. The vaults housed a group of 10 shops built in the 1890s, frequented by both tourists and locals who flocked to the foreshore at the time. After the shops’ removal in the 1950s, the area was bricked over in the 1970s to facilitate road widening, which took precedence. In some ways, their disappearance reflects how the desire for something ‘new’ or the need to go ‘faster’ will always eclipse pre-existing uses in the settler-cities’ logic.
But their vacancy also offers time to think and space to park your car along the widened road. There is no need to rush. There is something else to see.
There is a group of rainbow lorikeets emerging from the disused vaults. Their presence unravels even more layers of the built environment, revealing much more than the quaint seaside shops that were once here – if we look and listen closely. The lorikeets transform from black and white to full colour as they dance against the grain, unlimited by the city’s imprint. They embody the resilience, agility and survivance of First Nation peoples, flora and fauna which adapted and thrived. Unlike the shops that disappeared behind the disused vaults, bricked over and painted a bluish grey, the lorikeets remained. They hid amongst city streets or in plain sight in the city’s sky even as so many other western architectures vanished, in the settler cities’ short history. Because what was always here is never lost even as environments shift. See beyond the built form that you live in. Look closer, watch the birds fly over you as you walk back to your car. Follow their direction instead of the widened road.
Stop; observe the past and see the future
Open the door to find another view; someone else lived here before you
Listen to the songbirds and parrots that originated here 53 million years ago. They still remain even as another luxury apartment building materialises and alters the settler city again.
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Kent Morris is an artist and curator of Barkindji and Irish heritage. His art practice reveals the continued presence and patterns of First Nations’ history, knowledge and culture in the contemporary Australian landscape despite ongoing interventions. Morris engages audiences to question long-held frames of reference by re-imagining and reconstructing the shapes and structures of the built environment to reflect the rhythms, form and geometric designs of First Nations’ iconography. Through digital photographic processes, Morris engages audiences by manipulating technological structures and nature into new forms that reflect Indigenous and Western knowledge systems interacting together reinforcing shared histories and First Nations’ cultural continuity since time immemorial.
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Timmah Ball is a writer, researcher and zine maker of Ballardong Noongar heritage. In 2021 she was the editor for First Nations writing at the Westerly Magazine and an Arts House Makeshift Publics artist where she developed the publication Do Planners Dream of Electric Trees? In 2016 she won the Patricia Hackett Prize for her essay ‘In Australia’ and has published in a range of literary journals and magazines such as Meanjin, the Griffith Review, Art Link and the Sydney Review of Books.