Tarralyi (dining table)

James Tylor’s work explores racial and cultural identity and its historical resonances. Rebecca Selleck’s focuses on the overlay of time and place to express the need for human accountability and the complexity of animal and environmental ethics in Australia. Together, the pair have focused their collaboration on examining nineteenth century Australian history and the entrenchment of the colonial project on Nunga (Aboriginal) people, language, land, and ecology. Tarralyi (dining table) 2022 is framed by Tylor’s cultural heritage and Selleck’s Australian heritage.

Tarralyi (Dining table) 2022 is from an installation series by Tylor and Selleck of furniture and photography titled ‘Warpulayinthi’, originally shown in the 2022 Adelaide Biennial Free/State. It is informed by the Kaurna term which translates to ‘work’ or ‘slavery.’ The installation is a homage to Tylor’s great-great grandmother who was a domestic servant on a farm in Balaclava, South Australia. Tylor’s constructed colonial-style furniture reference the dairy and wheat farms where Nunga (Aboriginal) people often worked, with their labour and contribution to the building of colonial Australia seldom recognised. Selleck has adorned the furniture with bronze casts of karkalla (pigface, carpbrotus rossii); patpawilya (samphire, tecticornia); ngangki (pigface, disphyma crassifolium); kityawilya (saltbush, atriplex sp); pirira (warrigal greens, tetragonia sp), and kurti (quandong seeds, santalum acuminatum) - native plants and kurtaka (kangaroo joey); marliana (mullet); kuti (cockles); and pira (oysters) - animals, to draw attention to the destruction of intricately managed ecosystems by monocultural farming practices that are still in use today.

The furniture has been carved into by Tylor with Kaurna motifs from the Kuri ceremony. The motifs represent absent Kaurna bodies and exist as an act of resistance and the continuation of culture in spite of two and a half centuries of oppression. Of their work, the artists have said: “[Warpulayinthi] is an important reminder of our past and its marked histories, as well as the strength of First Nations peoples and cultures. We show our son the plants to eat, the birds in the trees, and the importance of land and place. This work threads through millennia, these brief centuries of destruction, and into a future that we are all making today.” James Tylor & Rebecca Selleck, 2022