Maiya Burnan Nyauwi is an exhibition of new work, created by Gail during her residency at Seventh and the Women’s Art Register (WAR) in 2024. Gail’s research project embarked on a multi-layered journey beginning at the WAR archives, uncovering both the connectivity, but also, primarily, the dearth of archival information relating to Victorian First People’s women.

A passion for collecting material is an innate part of us in many ways, however delving into archives often reveals institutional biases and broader collecting focuses. This investigation is crucial for understanding what collecting signifies to diverse communities. It raises questions about legacy and its significance within singular projects like those at WAR. Often, First Peoples' women are not at the core of such collections, yet WAR's extensive material is invaluable for connection and recognition.

Maiya Burnan Nyauwi (Winter Sunrise) includes a variety of new works created by Gail during her residency, across printmaking, photography, craft, and archival material. The essence of the exhibition centres around making and creating despite the constraints of distance and time. It is about prodigious change, and working/living across locations, and the sights seen travelling such as the brolgas in the wetlands on the way to see family.

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Sunrise – each day can bring memories as the sun (ngauwi) rises over Mother Earth, with the memories of what has happened before, both unwanted and cherished, all contributing to the feeling of being alive and acknowledging what we have experienced. Sunrise can inspire as a brief but stunning sight. Sunrise can create a time to revisit feelings about grief and loss and the damage oppression and trauma inevitably does in seeping into our culture and ways. At the same time, it allows a time to heal and gather one’s thoughts and courage to work through the coming day. Sunrise is a time to refresh and recharge ready for trying again to achieve and create lasting change. I think about the impacts of linking into archival collections - down to photo-copied newspaper articles of First Peoples women artists that resonate, and all the visual prompts one sees in travelling through the day, and what blooms in one’s heart - whether it is ruby red colours, being visited by a black cockatoo, making women’s dance belts, carving out a lino for printing or thinking of a new way to photograph ways of seeing culture and self.

— Gail Harradine, 2024

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Maiya Burnan Nyauwi (Winter Sunrise) is a journey of awakening from Wotjobaluk Djubagalk visual artist, curator and cultural educator Gail Harradine. An exhibition of new works created during the inaugural Seventh Gallery x Women’s Art Register (WAR) residency, the exhibition emerges from the darkness of a colonial lens to illuminate deep time culture and a path to healing. Showing at Seventh Gallery, 7th August to 7th September 2024.

Like a songline reveals cultural lore, WAR is a living archive that tells the story of women’s art in Australia. Exploring its range of catalogues, slides, journals, newspaper articles and digital records, Gail examined the ways in which Victorian First People’s women have been documented. Discovering biases of traditional archival systems, an anabranch of ideas flowed towards a dialogue of recognition, decolonisation, connection and legacy.

Gail’s research findings were augmented at the Seventh Gallery studio through her own cultural identity, kinship history and experiences travelling through Country. ‘Expanding and reflecting on the concept of truth and integrity in valuing cultural knowledge’, she collated Maiya Burnan Nyauwi as a series of multilayered conversations using printmaking, photography, cultural craft, and photocopied archival material.

Past the gallery threshold, and the striking first glance of an installation made of wool, feathers, doilies, and crocheted belts that spills from the ceiling to a larr (nest) on the floor, we look back to the door and the skyline view of Nana (gukwan) Maria’s weaving (bungurt basket rush). Vibrant pink brushstrokes loosely cross-hatched over a muted background breathe life into a woven vessel. The colour ignites memory and the practice of weaving: of sitting in a circle and being grounded in yarning, our words flowing with the tidal motion of grass being worked into vessels. The grass connects us to the landscape, harvesting, kin roles and relationships; and the vessels carry the stories of family, blessings, and survival. In this intersection we meet with our ancestors.

Acknowledging ancestors is an integral part of Indigenous art making. We can only exist in their creation, and their survival is the guiding light of our maiya burnan nyauwi. Gail’s anabranching of recognition and connection between ancestors and archives presents through blurred black and white images overlaid as markers between darkness and light, ignorance and acceptance, and truth and fiction.

Entering an archive space as an Indigenous person requires courage. The burden of cultural erasure, historical oppression and the lens of deficiency seeps into the spirit and imposes its own toxic darkness. As a kind of antithesis to this darkness, Brolga 1 and Brolga 2 stand tall and proud with the grandeur of a diptych honouring a church altar. But the rendering of these images of ceremonial birds on a deep green landscape, is in hot pink spray paint. The sanctity of prayer born from rallies and expressed through the hiss of spray cans. We are still here. We are still holding space, and our ceremony will take its rightful place.

Gail attributes the vibrant pink to be ‘about strength and standing up for oneself - that inner feeling of feeling whole inside, and proud’. The vitality of pinks throughout Maiya Burnan Nyauwi create an ebb and flow between the spark of delight and the slow soldering stories beneath. The superficial is swept aside for internal reflection. We are invited to celebrate cultural activation and the beauty of now - a legacy of recovery that connects archive, artist and audience.

- Monique Grbec, 2024