His research and practice focus on refiguring Australian art and culture from an Indigenous ideological perspective based on a reciprocal relationship to Country. His work has been recognised in various art prizes and is held in various private and public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria. His publication history has investigated the relationship of materialism in the arts to an Indigenous worldview and Aboriginal knowledge framework and epistemology. He has further reconfigured understandings of culture and visual practice from an Aboriginal perspective. The project team members present interdisciplinary expertise in Indigenous ways of knowing, creative practices, urban and architectural design, urban geology and history and subterranean spaces and volumetric urbanism. The team includes Boon Wurrung traditional owner N’arweet Dr Carolyn Briggs AM, architect Nigel Bertram, academics and researchers Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita and Laura Harper and urban planner Catherine Murphy.
The Intangible Country and the Underground
This project looks at the material underneath our everyday surfaces. By taking a core sample and images of the underground, we will create a large bronze public sculptural work that reveals Country and the surface beneath us and the urbanised environment. Audiences will experience the multiple layers beneath their feet, creating a materialisation of Country, the intangible and the Underground.
The project team sees Country as a living subject, and we would like to explore this further in revealing the intangible aspects of Country in artworks for the public realm. Brian’s artistic practice has focused on articulating Indigenous conceptualisations of Country as opposed to a western configuration of land, and from this we extend the deep idea of Country as a living subject by bringing the Country underneath to the surface.
This specific public realm project is to develop this research of the ‘underground’ through visual practice and experiment with its materialisation in the public realm and in particular, in the City of Melbourne. The idea is to bring the underground to the surface and look at the concept of material depth and deep time. We are looking to represent the many layers of the underground and therefore the multiple histories in the City of Melbourne. This process will also involve deep consultation with Traditional Owner groups of the area which will be examined. The intention through this proposed public artwork is to immerse viewers in the narratives of creation in Country and how these can further reveal the deep nature of Indigenous ideologies.
The significance of this project lays in the currency around the monument in Australia and how this ignores an Indigenous positioning and cultural interface.