Kent Morris
Barkindji Blue Sky - Ancestral Connections
2021
HD Video
14 minutes 45 seconds
Located in the UTS Central, Jones St Lobby
Building 2, Level 4A
(CB02.4A)
The work of Kent Morris (Barkindji/AU) reveals the continuing presence and patterns of Aboriginal history, culture and knowledge in the contemporary Australian landscape, despite ongoing colonial interventions in the physical and political environments.
This major video commission by Kent Morris refers to the Barkindji Ancestral constellation story of the two kiinki’ngulu sisters, who appear as two white cockatoos (Corellas) in the sky, representing the clouds of Magellan. This story connects Barkindji people to ancestors and the cosmos in a cultural continuum of shared knowledge that reinforces spiritual cohesion and connection.
Kent Morris is the fifth artist to be commissioned for the UTS Broadway screen, a program of site-specific digital art commissions by leading Australian artists located in UTS Central (Building 2).
The intertwining of Aboriginal cultural knowledge systems, technology and the built environment is an important and integral element to Kent Morris' works. Morris' artworks reveal the continuing presence of First Nations knowledge, history and culture in the contemporary Australian landscape despite ongoing colonial interventions by re-imagining and reconstructing the built environment to reflect Indigenous systems of knowledge and design.
A Barkindji man living on Yaluk-ut Weelam Country in Melbourne, Kent Morris graduated from Monash University and the Victorian College of the Arts and is an alumnus of the National Gallery of Australia’s Wesfarmers Indigenous Leadership Program. He also leads The Torch, a not for profit community arts organisation that provides art, cultural and arts vocational support to Indigenous offenders and ex-offenders in Victoria through a program he designed and developed in 2011.
Kent has exhibited widely throughout Australia and has worked on large scale architectural commissions for the UTS College, Sydney, and Australian Unity, Melbourne. He has also completed public works including billboard projects for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in 2020, and the Incinerator Gallery in 2019. In 2019 Kent exhibited his Unvanished series and completed a artist residency at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville USA.
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