Echoed Ground, 2025

Exhibition

5 June

Arabella Walker
4 July - 2 August 2025

This installation breathes with life, a choreographed interplay of movement, image, sound, and scent. Archival photographs and original artworks enter into a dynamic conversation, interweaving historical memory with personal reflection. What emerges is a rich, layered narrative of Auburn Station: a place imbued with pride, warmth, and familial legacy.

Arabella Walker, an early career contemporary Aboriginal artist, draws on her maternal lineage of Wulli Wulli, Auburn Hawkwood people. Through this installation, she explores cultural protocols, kinship connections, and traditions, creating a deeply personal and culturally grounded response to place.

Lightweight fabrics drift through the space in fluid motion, their organic flow conjuring a quiet, captivating rhythm. Black and white archival images merge with vibrant contemporary works, evoking a dialogue across time - between past and present, memory and self. At the centre of the installation lies Walker’s intimate connection to Auburn Station, expressed through plaited forms, bold visual gestures, and motifs drawn from the surrounding landscape and its enduring spirit.

Walker’s background in dance informs the installation’s choreographic presence. Movement becomes a conduit for ritual and ceremony, not only as performance, but as a form of contemporary cultural expression.

Scent is introduced as a subtle yet potent motif - familiar, evocative, and deeply embedded in memory. This olfactory presence gently expands the sensory field, inviting visitors to move beyond sight and sound, and into an embodied memory of place.

The soundscape further anchors the experience, transporting you to Country. Wind moves across the landscape, the Auburn River runs, and stories of those who lived there are shared. These spoken memories are passed down through generations, echoing with love, resilience, and connection.

Together, these elements offer a glimpse into the memory and identity of a place that lives within Walker. Auburn Station is not simply a location - it is a lived history, an emotional terrain, and an enduring presence within the artist.

Arabella Walker is from a maternal line of Wulli Wulli, Auburn Hawkwood people. She is an early career contemporary Aboriginal artist. Walker's practice conveys significant topics of First Nations histories with a focus on the challenge of being an Aboriginal woman living in the Colony. Walker deals with this challenge by weaving Indigenous ways of knowing and being into knowledges of culture and protocols, connections, and traditions, through a variety of media. The body is activated to express ideas, cultural knowledge, histories, stories and cultural connections. Media, such as acrylic paints, video projections, and installations form an interdisciplinary dialogue. Walkers creative process communicates a cultural intent in ways that words can not.

Emerging from a dance background, Walker incorporates multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary practices. Walker achieves this by using explosions of colour and energetic mark making that wash over her. Dance is used to connect traditions of ritual and ceremony as a form of contemporary expression. Analysis of research methodologies and data collection extend and strengthen Walker’s creative art practice in all its forms. Walker seeks research connected to personal history; further development of creative self; community connection; academia; and First Nations culture.

@arabella_wakler_artz