Aidan Hartshorn on Bringing Visibility to Forgotten Storytelling

This story is part of a series profiling artists and mentors involved in the Country Road + NGV First Nations Commissions: My Country. In their own words, artists and mentors share their personal stories, shine a light on their work and community and share the messages they have for the next generation of First Nations creatives.

Here, Aidan talks about bringing visibility to Walgalu storytelling and how culture is represented in contemporary practice.

I think back on my 29 years and there was never a moment where I wasn’t going to be a maker, or I guess an artist. It was in my blood. My grandmother Vicki Hartshorn taught me how to draw and that’s where my passion grew and comes from, which meant that I partook in art all through high school and gravitated towards drawing. In 2013, I was a part of the Art Gallery of New South Wales ARTEXPRESS exhibition where I drew pictures of the Titanic as a metaphor of my struggles at that time, which was my first taste of art success. Art has always been my drive and coming from a small town, I didn’t know what that would look like as a career, but I’ve been lucky.

Further into my career, I joined the Wesfarmers Leadership Program where I would later become part of the First Nations team at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) where I worked on the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial (NIAT) with curators Hetti Perkins and Kelli Cole for two and half years. At this time, I was also sessional teaching at the ANU, strangely but happily, in a course that I took part in when I was younger in my undergraduate degree—a course called the Environment Studio where I taught, and still do, practice-led research and artistic-led fieldwork.

Being part of this commissions process was interesting, because I’ve also been on the other side of something like this. Working on NIAT was similar in that we commissioned mostly all new work from artists, so I understood quite a bit about the process and the pressures and what was being asked of us.

My mentor for the commission was artist James Tylor, who I have had a strong friendship and relationship since 2017. Around the time I met James, I was at the point of bringing my cultural storytelling to the forefront of my work. I resisted that for a while and came to it in my own time as for years I had been pushed and pushed to be to the Blackfulla that everyone wanted. I later realised that there were actually issues and outsider ideas, whether they be personal, or family related, that I could address in my practice regarding my identity as a Walgalu man living today.

My family always grew up with our culture around us and later in life, my dad later became a heritage officer at National Parks. Through learning cultural practice from my father, I’m really interested in exploring how culture and practice don’t have to stay in or be told within the past—I am interested in how we as Walgalu people living and practicing today, can create new forms of practice and culture. The relationship with James helped to make those ideas come through for me and forced me to consider the question of what it means to be a Walgalu person practicing in 2024.

In our case, we don’t have access to many areas due to the Snowy Hydro scheme built in the 1960s.

There’s a campground for instance called Yolde campground, which was traditionally used as a gathering space to prepare for ceremony. We have found many objects that support this as well as historical texts and writing about the area. Bringing these sorts of stories to light, is creating visibility for our people in that space, visibility for the site itself and for the ancestor Bila (water) that is being controlled in that area now. The water is very culturally significant, though it is hard because water has now become our inhibitor. Our ancestor has become an inhibitor to our own space, not because it wants to be, but because it is forced to by its controller.

To access these spaces now, we must wait for a drought or for the water level to drop to access the river that flows underneath, the now-still body of water. Bringing visibility to the ancestor’s voice and to other ancestors and spirits is an important part of my practice. I take my students to this space, and I allow them to experience it through my lens and then through talking about the space, through the lens of my people. They sit in silence, and they tell me what they hear. Every time we go there, there is either a car driving over the banks of the site or a fishing boat trawling over the site itself, creating a constant contest for space.

My installation ‘These violent delights’ speaks to this. Through 16 glass shields which refer to the 16 dams of the Snowy Hydro Scheme, I bring Walgalu Country and story to audiences. The use of glass was a new medium for me to work in, though I wanted to push myself and my practice.

Seeing everyone else’s work in the exhibition was interesting. I loved Mitch Mahoney’s work with the making of the canoe. It resonated with me because I had originally thought to create a canoe and it made me think of my Country. I was also intrigued by Warraba Weatherall’s piece, the dissonant sound was sweet but malevolent to me. It was the sound of the dissonance between cultures.

Seeing these works made me realise that the narrative is not that different to others. We are all fighting for the same things. With my work, it’s about visibility and for other people to see and recognise that we, the Walgalu, are still here, present.