Exhibition: 27 June – 28 August 2026
CAIRNS ART GALLERY | COURTHOUSE GALLERY
For Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Sam Harrison, the question of selfhood exacts a collective answer. It is a question that concerns the entanglement of the self not simply with others, but with the world, and indeed existence.
In Kin’o’centrism, Harrison proposes an Indigenous cosmological model of kinship, where relations unfold across the human, animal, botanical, celestial, and spiritual worlds—and beyond. It is a model grounded in non-linear time; time is cyclic and immemorial. Kinship, then, is not something that simply happens across time, but deeply with, and within, time. Harrison foregrounds Indigenous understandings of time, where the past, present, and future ceaselessly commingle.
The apex to the exhibition is the Eclipse series (2026), an assemblage of tessellating lightboxes where scenes of secular and cultural life are rendered within cosmological cycles. This series articulates a universal Indigenous understanding of relationality and responsibility, where care for Community and Country is mutually realised.
Other important motifs for Harrison are Wahn (crow) and Bahloo (moon), seen within the lightboxes and also physically in the space. Bahloo appears on circular video projections on opposing sides of the space. One projection, Cosmic Mirror, renders a lunar cycle that ends in eclipse. The other, Kin’o’centric Model 1, depicts a particle simulation as it moves between cycles of order and disorder. Above and between the two projections is Darkness: Absent x Present, a murder of laser-cut crows. Both crow and moon motifs remind us that disturbance and harmony coincide, that relational tension is also generative and sustaining.
For Harrison, the individual never stands separately from others; they are inescapably relational. To be kin’o’centric, then, is to recognise that ‘we’ takes in people, ancestors, Country, animals, plants, the stars, and all of life itself. It also is to understand that our relationality is never fixed but continuously tested and negotiated.
Images: Louis Lim. Courtesy of the artist and Onespace.
