2020 IB Extended Essays

today. Coincidentally the detergent is personally connected to Harding himself as his mother would regularly use it in her job as a domestic worker.

Dale Harding, Reckitt’s Blue, 2017.

Sprayed onto a plaster board wall at the Queensland Art Gallery, Harding references historic works in his composition as the installation presents itself in a long

landscape format. Using the frame of the artist’s own body, the piece conveys

abstraction and associations of bodies over generations as the imagery of the artwork steers from a material culture. Three spectral outlines seen in the top right-

hand corner of the wall embody the women of Harding’s family who have preserved

their knowledge of Indigenous culture. The silhouette of a shovel handle is scattered throughout the composition, similarly to the way that boomerangs and spears were depicted in traditional paintings. Channel-like grooves in the wall replicate natural landforms of Australian outback and make reference to the river systems which connected Aboriginal communities in central and south-east Queensland. The land

that’s portrayed in the image is imbued with ancestral presence whilst also creating a

narrative of displacement ( Dale Harding’s Narratives of Displacement, 2019 ).