A shrine for all you gave me

Jasmine Miikika Craciun

Gallery 2

room sheet

“When the welfare was coming, you’d see dust in the air,” Nan recalls. “They swept for miles.” She is speaking of her mother and all the mothers before her. The act of sweeping around their tin humpies was a physical plea to keep their children at home. This installation is a tribute to the resilience of the matriarchal figures in my life. 

My Nan, Maryann Hausia (nee Bates), began photographing her community in Wilcannia at 15, using a  brownie box camera gifted by her own mother, my great-grandmother. Her photographs capture a perspec tive of love, life, and joy—views rarely seen in colonial archives of Aboriginal people. 

Nan’s photos form the foundation of the glass work featured in this exhibition, celebrating the lives my matri archs nurtured on the flats in the face of racism, dispossession, and the Stolen Generations. 

The video work in this exhibition is a collaboration between myself and Nan, who has graciously allowed me  to turn the lens onto her, recreating the sweeping she remembers from her youth. This work takes us to the  many places my Nan, Mum, and Aunties lived around Wilcannia, highlighting the efforts of each matriarch  before them to create comfort in harsh conditions. 

There is an obvious reference to religion in this space, intentionally enshrining my matriarchs within these  glass windows to reclaim the colonial efforts that sought to indoctrinate us. Found glass that remains on the  flats where the humpies once stood is used in the creation of these windows. 

Using remnants of the world that my Mum, Aunties, and Nan lived in I want to celebrate the love and life,  and strength they embody. Like the beautiful coloured glass and crockery that has stood the test of time on the sandy flats of Wilcannia long after the humpies have gone, the matriarchs of my lineage do the same.