Archie Moore: kith and kin, 2024

During the 1970s, Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist Archie Moore was growing up in the rural town of Tara, about 300 kilometres west of Brisbane. His family was poor and, as an Aboriginal boy in a predominantly Anglo-Celtic town, he spent much of his childhood trying to be “invisible.” “I did my best to be less Aboriginal – to be inconspicuous, quiet, avoid the sun, and avoid other Aboriginal people,” he has said. “I didn’t really fully know what the word Aboriginal meant, just that it was something horrible.”

After school, Moore moved to Brisbane. It was a formative period. He has talked about the importance of his time spent studying at Gateway TAFE where, in 1995, he obtained an advanced certificate in art and design. Soon after, he decided to enrol in a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology. When he graduated, he was awarded a highly regarded Samstag Scholarship, which enabled him to spend a year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Czech Republic. Since then, for over twenty-five years, Moore’s artistic practice has reflected his personal background as well as addressing Australia’s history. In 2023, Moore and curator Ellie Buttrose were chosen to exhibit in the Australia Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, and Moore’s installation, kith and kin, won Australia’s first Golden Lion, the most prestigious award presented.

After Venice, kith and kin was gifted by Creative Australia on behalf of the Australian Government to both the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane and Tate, London. Now, for the first time since kith and kin’s debut in Venice, it is on display in Brisbane. When you walk into the exhibition your eyes adjust to the low light levels allowing you to focus on the expansive installation, hand drawn by Moore with white chalk to cover all the walls. The work traces the artist’s personal history over 65,000 years of his maternal relations, as well as his more recent paternal English and Scottish relations. Also included in the room is a reflective pool, a memorial for the Indigenous people who died in police custody. Hovering above the water on a table are the 557 inquests dating between 1991, coinciding with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, up until the end of 2023 when Moore was finishing the work.

Ellie Buttrose, curator of kith and kin and curator, contemporary art, at QAGOMA, tells me that audiences have been responding to the “incredible generosity” that Moore infuses into kith and kin. “The work envelops viewers in a First Nations understanding of time, by making deep time and recent history felt in the here and now,” she says. “While speaking to 65,000 years of First Nations kinship, the artist also shows how everyone on Earth is related, and with this familial relationship comes the responsibility to stop the over-incarceration of First Nations people.”

Early in the process of making kith and kin, Moore, Buttrose, and the exhibition design consultant Kevin O’Brien discussed whether the artist should draw the sixty metres of kinship web on panels in his Redland studio near Brisbane and ship them to Venice and then to QAGOMA. As Buttrose explains: “Even though it would have been much easier and there would only have been hairline joins, we agreed there was something more powerful about the unbroken line on the walls of the gallery.”

Buttrose says that this decision meant that the artwork is hand drawn each time it is installed. “Knowing that the expansive artwork is drawn by hand in the space that the audience is standing in adds to the sense of wonder. As the artwork was built in situ, and although we did small tests, we never saw it in full until just before it opened to the public in Venice, and I said to Archie that I was so proud of what we achieved together with the team.”

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Bronwyn Watson has been writing about visual arts for leading newspapers and magazines for over thirty-five years.

 

Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
On display in kith and kin until 18 October 2026
Queensland

Originally published in print – Art Almanac, July 2026 issue, pp. 32–34