Amala Groom: The Lodge

“Every gesture is intentional.”

Wiradyuri artist Amala Groom presents her video work, The Lodge, 2024, at Canberra Contemporary, the third artwork in the series Raised by Wolves. Wearing a wedding dress, the artist weaves and unravels a red rope along Anzac Parade at Canberra’s Parliamentary Triangle on Ngunnawal Country. It brings together her roles as an artist and activist – from her years organising protests at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy to her role as the youngest Director of The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples – for an emotionally charged performance. We speak to Groom ahead of the opening.

Amala Groom, The Lodge (production stills), 2025, single-channel video, 6K UHD video, colour, sound, 11:11 minutes. Photograph: Ryan Andrew Lee. Courtesy the artist and Canberra Contemporary, Australian Capital Territory

What can we expect visually from The Lodge?
Visually, The Lodge is lush and surreal – a single-channel 6K work where presence and absence blur. Through in-camera trickery and editing, I disappear and reappear across key sites in Canberra’s Parliamentary Triangle, bound by red rope and spiritual intent. The conceptual arc follows a journey story, beginning at Mount Ainslie and traversing the sites, culminating in my sovereign re-emergence in the bush beyond New Parliament House, circling right back to Mount Ainslie. The work begins where it ends, as with time, is non-linear. You’ll see the interplay of sacred geometry, and the soundscape will be littered with the cardinal elements of fire, water, earth, air and aether, and feel the cyclical nature of temporality.

How was the work created?
The work was choreographed as a ritual, not a reenactment. Every gesture is intentional. The wedding dress signifies the binding nature of third-dimensional reality – especially for First Nations women, whose bodies are often sites of both resistance and repression. Pulling and being pulled by the red rope became a visceral act: part ceremonial, part struggle. It represents the umbilical connection between the physical and spiritual, and the constraints imposed by the colonial state. Moving along Anzac Parade while tethered in this way was both physically demanding and spiritually revealing. I was re-weaving geometry into the land, tracing a songline through spaces that have long been pathways of ceremony – though now paved and renamed.

Can you tell me more about the concepts and the connection to Canberra’s Parliamentary Triangle?
The Lodge draws on the alchemical belief that existence is a union between spirit and matter, with the human body as the crucible in which this synthesis occurs. For me, that convergence is not theoretical – it’s lived, embodied, and deeply tied to place. The Parliamentary Triangle holds a particular resonance: while it symbolises colonial authority, it also overlays a much older ceremonial landscape.

Importantly, The Lodge also acknowledges Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin’s obsession with geomancy, sacred geometry, and Theosophy. They envisioned Canberra as a spiritual centre – a metaphysical construct. In The Lodge, I acknowledge these latent energies, aligning them with First Nations cosmologies and my ceremonial practice. The work becomes a way to reclaim and reorient the original spiritual architecture of this place, revealing what has always been present, just beneath the surface.

How does this work sit in the series as the third edition of the Raised by Wolves series?
As the third edition in the Raised by Wolves series, The Lodge marks a turning point – both structurally and thematically. The series investigates the intersection of spirit and matter through autobiographical performance. The Lodge shifts the focus inward and upward – it is about transformation. It’s where the mythic begins to crystallise in the real world, through a ceremonial reclamation of space and self. It also prepares the ground for THE THE, the next work in the series, where this inner metamorphosis will extend fully into the metaphysical.

@amalagroom