What's left behind

Brook Andrew’s work calls into question dominant accounts of history, often by using found images and museum-like display structures.

The sculptural vitrines in 'What’s left behind' each represent an element – water, air, fire, earth and metal – conjuring environmental forces. The archives they house, by contrast, suggest an approach to knowing and ordering the world that revolves around objects and documents.

Many of the materials that Andrew has assembled refer to global narratives of colonisation. The relations between them are deliberately unfixed. By dispensing with historical conventions like classification and chronology, the work points to the different meanings that can attach to objects as they move between contexts and are subject to shifting agendas.

The inflatable forms are covered in Andrew’s signature black-and-white graphic patterning, adapted from Wiradjuri shield designs and dendroglyphs. Like giant globes, they seem to propose a new world order.