About Dominic White
I am a Palawa, Trawoolway man, descendant of the Tyereelore, through my birth mother’s family. I am an adopted Kid and have been following a process of reclamation of my heritage and links to Tebrakunna country.
I am a multidisciplinary artist exploring connection, observation, responsibility, and obligation in different media. My work examines cultural, historical, and contemporary colonial interaction with First Nations people.
Currently, I am a PhD candidate at the RMIT School of Art. My research is engaged with Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being, Yarning processes, Decolonisation structures, Praxis, and Social Engaged Art Practice.
Trained as a Printmaker, my work spans contemporary Printmaking, Sculpture, Photography, Performative acts, and contemporary Jewellery and design. Often, the material cultural context informs the work.
I am based in Bunurong /Boonwurung country (Mornington Peninsula), father of 2, and teach art to support my art making.
Video Transcript
How would you like to introduce yourself?
I’m a palawa man, a Trawoolway man from Tebrakunna country, which is in the top north-east of Tasmania. Yeah, so I grew up on Boon wurrung & Bunurong country down on the Mornington Peninsula and I try to live there now. Yeah.
Can you tell us a bit about your career as an artist?
I left high school and went straight into Monash, or Chisholm as it was then, Monash University to do a BA in Arts and I finished that in about 91. And since then I’ve been making and making art. I did that undergrad in printmaking. So I trained printmaking and I guess have had a fair eye on the skill, the first, you know, five, ten years were all about skill development and having a really strong handle on that medium. I mainly work with etching and relief, so intaglio relief. So trying to get that process into my hands and get to know inks. I did a post grad up at the ANU finishing in 96 and worked with the wonderful Jorg Schmeisser who was a pretty important printmaker at the time. And I spent a lot of time, it was at the ANU where I walked around Mount Ainslie every day and kind of tried to understand landscape away from the perspective of a European framework. So landscape as something you’re engaged in, you’re within rather than, and part of rather than something externalised, I guess. So that was, you know, I’d follow kangaroo trails, I’d follow wallaby trails and then the mark making that I’d use to describe that walk would not necessarily mimic but be informed by that movement. Printmaking is all about mark making. So I was trying to make marks that would communicate some of the experience of being within or part of a landscape rather than external to a landscape. I also, and I guess from there I returned back to the Peninsula or returned to the city. And since then I’ve been practising art. I guess there was a bit of a disruption for about 10 years where I became an outdoor ed leader, I then became a teacher, taught art and raised a family. So I kind of had a 10 year sabbatical from making where I was teaching, I was teaching art making and I was teaching how we go about making art. And that was a really good thing to do, but there was probably a fair amount of grief there about not practising, about not being able to survive economically and wanting to have a family and therefore having to make economic choices about how I spent my time. But during that time, my wife at the time and I bought a house and I built a studio and I created a space in which I could ultimately make work. I raised my boys 50-50, so I was at home half the time and that allowed me time to build and kind of set myself up for my forties. And I guess when I hit my forties, I then had a bit more space and started pushing towards art, became involved with Baluk Arts, which was kind of the culmination of a lot of time thinking about my Indigenous heritage and then rolling on to, I guess, my art practice changing from being of a Western ego based projection to something a bit more open minded and community based or based on ideas that were complex or not necessarily related as art with a capital A, but related to culture and cultural practice and how to engage and interact and translate within the community.
Can you tell us about the development of your PhD project?
So I guess, I mean it’s a doctorate in fine arts, so there’s a creative process where I make stuff and where I explore ideas through making. And there’s also I guess my supervisory team who are really generous and open and very supportive of me trying to negotiate my own ideas and build them. I’m lucky enough to have Mandy Nicholson, Tom Nicholson and Christine Gist as my supervisory team. And they are all generous wonderful people who are supporting a lot of people and helping people get through this process and that’s been really, you know, it’s been a really exciting process to work with them. I’m also lucky enough to work with Jade Kennedy and Kate Mitchell and Scott Mitchell and Stephen Gilchrist who are all people who give time and energy and I work with them at the community level. We’re all part of Baluk Arts. Jade is the coordinator of Baluk Arts and she’s great, she’s wonderful and she’s been, she’s brilliant to work with and she’s an amazing organiser. And there’s a raft of Elders who are part of Baluk and I also speak with them and draw from them and they’re also generous with their time and giving of time and energy. And there’s many other people, so there’s a real community who are making up this process that I’m engaged in. The process is really interesting. I’m using the space of the doctorate to take a concept that I guess I’ve been thinking about for a long time and try to translate it into objects that an audience can engage with, can use hopefully. So the process is developing the concept, developing an artifact. I’d better step back a bit. The concept is that we’ve got this violent, brutal invasion and genocide and ongoing colonial project which is undeniable and that there are many aspects to that project that are still affecting our communities. And trauma is one of those and part of this project and my method for engaging with it is I’m trying to create I guess a simple model that might allow people to be present with their trauma rather than external to it or separate from it. I’m looking at rituals within Indigenous communities with sweat lodges, with ceremony, with yarning, and trying to look at what’s common with those things. There are spaces where we create boundary where we do not, we try to remove judgement and try to allow people to just be present with how they feel, what they feel, and I think that’s really healthy and allowing that presence allows the trauma to move through us rather than to stay with us. So that’s kind of the core concept of this and how I’ve come to that is through reading really and through engagement with grief work and through a personal understanding that it’s taken me time to be able to cry, it’s taken me time to be able to allow grief to be part of the way I engage with the world rather than something to fear, that’s really important to me. I understand that as a man within culture there’s a lot of difficulty within that because men, blokes, boys, often can’t express themselves that way. And there’s a real toll for that. So I want to, I guess this is the other context of this conversation, we have the highest rate of suicide of any males in the world. It’s Black males in this country, we need to do something about it and it’s connected to trauma and it’s connected to dislocation. So the idea is a really simple idea and there are many different ways that people are engaging with trauma and building tools to engage with trauma. It’s not like this is the one way, but I think if I could make a simple tool I guess that’s easy to use and that removes as much of that, whatever clutter there is, and then hopefully allows people to just be present with how they feel. That might be useful. So in the process I use as much as I can First Nations knowledge systems, First Nations thinkers to inform that idea, to give it room to breathe and to build and to become something. That’s really important in the process because the only way, well not the only way, but I believe that the best way we can engage with this invasion or the colonial project, the ongoing colonial project, is to reassert our systems, reassert our knowledge systems and be confident in those systems and give them space and take up that space. So I really try to do that in the process. The other thing is I also make sure that where I am has a part of it. And we’re trying to work through a Boon wurrung practice and Bunurong practice. This is the land we’re speaking on. And I talked to Jade and Kate and we talked to some of the Elders and we’ve been trying to negotiate a way in which we can kind of build those same ideas or these ideas that have a conceptual space within art and Boon wurrung practice, within cultural practice and language. The other part of it and I guess from an academic perspective, it’s been really helpful because I get to teach within my, oh sorry, I work within my First Nations knowledge frameworks, First Nations research methods and frameworks and that’s been explored really well by Linda Tuhiwai Smith in particular. She’s written a lot on decolonising methodologies. And that’s been supported by Tyson Yunkaporta and Shawn Wilson and there’s a raft of different people who are building these, this really interesting space to help First Nations knowledge systems be supported and exist within the structures of whitefella institutions or institutions that have historically been Western based and white dominated and closed off to us. So I’m using the space of the university and the time and that support to explore, to research, to build a concept, to build an object that can potentially be useful for community. And I guess that’s then a socially engaged art practice which rolls on from that. So we’ve got First Nations research methods, we’ve got engagement with Boon wurrung practice or trying to do that and we’ve also got a process where I’m using art practice as a way of communicating a complex idea through making, through a process of making. I use studio craft, I work with clay, that’s been great. So I’m engaging with clay and I’ve got a series of objects that I’ll be presenting as my exhibition and I guess that also hopefully will, will go beyond me through the Boon wurrung and Bunurong community. We’re trying to build a language of this as a practice of presence that can be useful for the community outside of me and we’ve got three different ways that people can engage with that which hopefully I will also be able to talk about. And I’m also, this is where it’s interesting and I’m collaborating. So and I don’t mean that in a studio art sense, I mean that in the sense that there are people who’ve been willing to come along on this journey. Brendan Kennedy who has passed away gave us some really important insight into materials and how they behave and move and he was wonderful, he was very kind with his time. And there are others who are around helping me think through the art practice and there are the Elders who are guiding how we use this within the community and how we try to engage language and cultural practice within this and that’s part of an ongoing process. The PhD gives me the time to do that.
Can you talk about the use of ceremony / ritual in First Nations communities?
Yeah, I’m kind of a little bit careful, I guess. I’m aware that there are many different language groups and there are many different ways of engaging with culture and country and knowledge systems. I’ve chosen, because I’m Trawoolway and I’m from Tasmania and this is a mainland mob I’m working with, Boon wurrung, I’ve chosen to kind of roll with their culture and their process. And I’m really aware that I don’t want to, I want to respect other’s use of those things and use of those processes. So I guess what I’m talking about is really broad and really basic and it’s not so much the ritual, it’s not the particularities of ritual, but just the idea of the form of ritual and what we do with it. And the form of ritual or the form of ceremony, you know, if we take smudging or we take yarning or we take yarning circles or we take a sweat lodge or a sweat, all of them create a particular space in which a particular way of behaving takes place and there’s a boundary to those things. So people are invited in, they’re expected to behave in a certain way, there’s often circles or sharing or there’s a shared voice and what happens is they are ritualised in the sense that they’re repeated. We go back to them. That’s what makes them a ritual or a ceremony. We repeat a behaviour and with that repetition there’s the space and the ability for people to share trauma, to share grief, to share history. And I guess what I think is a real quality of those rituals or those ceremonies is that they’re not so heavily analysed and worried about as we would in a whitefella context. Where there’s this constant discussion on whether it’s healthy for you or whether we should be doing this or should we be doing that. We just are, we allow people the space to just be how they are. And I think that’s a really powerful thing and that’s one thing I’ve noticed within our community. Where there’s just that expectation that what occurs, occurs and that we can be part of that. And that’s that really open, I guess that empathy and shared experience and that is a way of being able to move forward and grieve and acknowledge what’s come before. So that’s, I guess it’s that process and it’s again, I want to be able to take those ideas and make them simple and allow them to be useful potentially for our own mob and for other First Nations folk but also for non-First Nations folk because I think they’re powerful ways of being able to engage with each other and I think we can learn from each other and that’s again that engagement across knowledge systems that can be really healthy and really powerful.
Can you talk about the themes of authenticity and universality / accessibility within First Nations art?
Yeah, so I guess I mean you’re kind of pointing towards, I often think that there’s this thing of authenticity, it’s kind of a strange thing. My friend Maree Clarke who’s a Yorta Yorta Mutti Mutti BoonWurrung woman who I admire very much and who I’ve had the fortune to be kind to me over the years. She has this idea that if you’re Blak and you’re making work, it’s Blak work. So there’s this kind of really simple idea that you can’t actually step outside of your blackness and nor should you or nor should you have to kind of acquiesce to being something else to satisfy a white gaze or a white expectation. And I find that really, I find that a strong position and I admire that in her work and the way she engages in the world. I’m probably a bit more willing to cross boundaries and to kind of step into spaces and it’s just, it’s neither right or wrong, it’s just, you know, the way we behave. And I guess the other thing I think about authenticity is that all First Nations people should be able to live their culture as they choose. And that there shouldn’t be this prescription of how they live their life or what they make or don’t make or whether they’re urban or rural or disconnected or connected. There’s this kind of, I think we’re all making our way through this and many of us are separated from culture and we find our way back when we can and if we can and there’s a journey there. And to enforce authenticity as some sort of gate to how you engage with your community or how you engage with objects and making is, I think that’s in some ways part of the colonial project because I think that just denies the complexity of who we are and where we are and it gives that whitefella kind of expectation and position power over what we do and how we do it and what is acceptable. So I guess that’s a really, that’s my thinking on that. So if we’re making work and we’re First Nations and we’re making work, then it’s First Nations work. Now the work may or may not communicate some of the ideas of what it is to be a First Nations person. It may or may not be positioned within a First Nations knowledge system. It may or may not have history and connection to culture or country or family or kin. But the thing is, if it’s made by a First Nations person, it’s a First Nations work. It’s part of the conversation. And that conversation and positioning of that work or that object is really up to that artist or that maker or that person. And we engage with it how we can. And I think the complexity of what we do and how we do it as First Nations people is actually a strength and it’s something that should be celebrated and honoured rather than confined and separated into categories of authenticity. But I get really frustrated when I, you know, I look at, you know, the voice debacle that we’ve just been through and when people are so easily willing to use our own language to attack each other or to diminish each other based on those perspectives of authenticity. And that I find, I think that comes from a colonial space. And I guess the other thing with universality and accessibility, I think that our knowledge systems are like any other knowledge systems. They’re complex and they’re valuable and they’re able to be applied broadly and there’s great wisdom within them and that wisdom can and should be shared when it’s appropriate and in the ways that it’s appropriate. So I don’t think, you know, and I’ve always loved Tyson Yunkaporta’s line, you know, “we’re not mystical unicorns”. We’re people who have these amazing ideas and who have real wisdom and real knowledge and we’ve been dispossessed of a lot of that knowledge and we’ve spent the last 200 odd years or 250 odd years kind of trying to claw that back and reclaim it and that’s a powerful thing. And in that reclamation, there’s also that opportunity for us to own it and to share it and to kind of build our understanding of where we are and where we’ve come from and what it is we do and how we do it. And hopefully engage with that broader community or those broader whitefella or Western structures and allow them the opportunity to kind of learn from our knowledge or see our knowledge or engage with our knowledge. And in that process I think what’s really important is that our systems remain ours. That they don’t become appropriated and that they maintain a First Nations voice and maintain the cultural structures that they were built within. And that becomes a bit of a tricky conversation in that I make objects as an artist and then I share them through a gallery system which is very white, very Western, historically very colonised and very colonial. And I guess part of my work at the moment and going forward is trying to negotiate, “well how do I engage in that conversation and that sharing but retain or maintain the integrity of the work and its First Nations positioning?” And I guess it’s trying to work between those two things and I don’t think there’s a right answer to it. I think a lot of it is to do with, I guess the sincerity of the work and the connection to community and who you’re engaging with and what you’re trying to communicate. So in this process at the moment, I’m trying to make objects that are useful for the community. I’m not trying to make objects that necessarily sit within a gallery space, though they can and they probably will at some stage. But really they’re there to be used and to engage community in an ongoing present way. And so I hope they can be accessible and I hope that they can be available for mob and for not mob, but used in a way that’s kind and generous and open to the potential of what they might be. And I guess that’s, yeah, I’m not quite sure if that fully addresses your question but…
Can you talk about the role of Country in your practice?
And how do you connect that to the grief you experience (eg. grief caused by wildfires and ecosystem degradation)? Yeah, so I think that being connected to country is really important because country isn’t just a place. And one of the things I find really useful about First Nations knowledge is that we think about country as being animate. Country has a voice, country has a way of communicating and we need to be able to listen to country and we need to be able to be present with country. And if we do that, hopefully we can then be present with ourselves and present with each other. And I think that that’s probably the core of where a lot of my practice comes from or where a lot of my thinking about this idea of presence comes from is that I’ve spent a lot of time on country. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to country and trying to understand what that is and how it works and how to be within it in a respectful way. And I think that’s been a great privilege and a great, you know, part of my life that I’m really lucky to have had the opportunity to do. In my late 20s and my 30s I was guiding kayak trips and guiding bushwalking trips and I spent a lot of time on country and I spent a lot of time getting to see parts of this land that most people won’t ever get to see. And I feel very lucky for that. And in that I think I developed a real deep connection and love of place. And that connection and that love is something that I’ve tried to bring to my art practice and bring to my way of thinking about how we engage with each other and how we engage with the world. So country is absolutely core to what I do. And the grief that comes with seeing what’s happening to country is also really important because we’re watching country be destroyed through extraction, through climate change, through fire, through drought, through flood. And those things are happening at an accelerating rate and we’re watching species disappear and we’re watching ecosystems collapse. And that’s a profound grief. And I think that’s a grief that we all need to be able to hold and be present with because if we can’t be present with that grief, we can’t actually engage with the reality of what’s happening. We can’t make change if we’re not present to the scale of what’s occurring. And I guess that’s part of this work is trying to make that space for people to be present with their grief about what’s happening to country, about what’s happening to community, about what’s happening to family, about what’s happening to self. And if we can create those spaces and we can allow people that presence, then hopefully we can start to move through some of that trauma and some of that grief and actually start to engage with the work that needs to be done to protect country, to heal country, to heal each other, to heal ourselves. So yeah, country is absolutely central to everything I do and the grief that comes with watching what’s happening to country is also central to the work I’m making.
Can you talk about the non-hierarchical processes you are using with community?
How is the community-based aspect working? Yeah, so I guess the idea of non-hierarchical process is really important because I think one of the issues with the colonial project is that it’s incredibly hierarchical. It’s built on power structures and it’s built on dominance and submission. And I think that’s a really unhealthy way of engaging with each other and engaging with the world. And I think First Nations knowledge systems offer us a different way of thinking about how we can be together. And so in the process of making this work, I’m trying to really consciously not assert my ideas or my position as the authority. I’m trying to create space where we can all contribute and we can all bring our knowledge and we can all bring our experience. And that means working with the Elders at Baluk, it means working with Jade and Kate, it means working with other community members and really trying to listen to what they have to say and what they think is important and what they want to explore. And I guess that’s a process of constant negotiation and constant checking in and making sure that what I’m doing is aligned with what the community wants and needs. And that’s been a really interesting process because it means letting go of a lot of control. It means being willing to have the work change and evolve in ways that I might not have anticipated. And it means being open to criticism and being open to feedback and being willing to adjust. And I think that’s a really healthy process and I think it’s one that actually makes the work stronger because it means that the work is informed by multiple perspectives and multiple voices rather than just my own ego or my own ideas. And I think that’s particularly important when we’re talking about trauma and grief because those are such personal experiences and everyone’s experience is different. And so if I’m making work that’s supposed to be useful for people to engage with their trauma and their grief, then it needs to be informed by their experiences, not just mine. So that community engagement, that community collaboration is absolutely core to the project. And it means that the work is constantly evolving and it means that I’m constantly learning and I’m constantly being challenged. And I think that’s a really valuable part of the process. The other thing I’d say is that working in this non-hierarchical way also means being really conscious about power dynamics and being really conscious about whose voices are being heard and whose voices might be being silenced. And trying to actively create space for people who might not usually have a voice or might not usually feel comfortable speaking up. And that’s an ongoing process and it’s something that I’m constantly trying to be attentive to.
Can you talk about the objects you’re creating as part of your PhD?
Yeah, so the objects I’m making are, I guess they’re ceramic vessels and they’re designed to be used in a particular way. They’re designed to hold water and they’re designed to hold breath in a sense. So the idea is that you engage with the object, you breathe into the object, you allow yourself to be present with how you’re feeling. And the object itself becomes a kind of witness to that presence. And I guess the idea comes from thinking about how we might create a simple tool that allows people to be present with their emotions, with their trauma, with their grief without needing to analyze it or fix it or make it go away. Just to be present with it. And the ceramic vessels are quite simple. They’re hand-built, they’re quite tactile, they’re designed to be held. And there’s a particular process of engaging with them. You hold the vessel, you fill it with water, you breathe across the water, and in that process there’s this moment of pause, this moment of being still, this moment of being present. And I think that’s really powerful because I think so much of our lives are about moving forward and doing the next thing and achieving the next goal. And we don’t often give ourselves permission to just stop and be present with how we actually feel. And so these objects are designed to create that permission, to create that space where it’s okay to just be with yourself and be with your emotions. And they’re designed to be used in community as well. So there’s a process where people can come together and they can use the vessels together and they can share that experience of presence. And I think that’s really powerful because I think when we share our grief, when we share our trauma, when we share our emotions with others, it becomes less isolating and it becomes something that we can move through together. So the objects are designed to work both individually and collectively. And they’re designed to be simple enough that anyone can use them regardless of their background or their experience or their knowledge. You don’t need to have any particular cultural knowledge or any particular training. You just need to be willing to be present with yourself. And I think that’s really important because I think the more accessible we can make these tools, the more useful they can be for people. And I’m also making other objects as part of the project. There are some larger ceremonial vessels that are designed to be used in bigger community gatherings. And there are some smaller personal vessels that people can take home with them. So there’s a range of different objects that serve different purposes but they all come back to this core idea of creating space for presence, creating space for people to be with their emotions and their trauma and their grief in a way that’s supportive and non-judgmental. Following those through that actually this may become helpful beyond me. And that I guess is that socially engaged art practice discourse, which is the final part and that’s kind of like what I’m making, you know, things that can be used by others that are only completed by others. So that hopefully my ego withdraws from the artwork and others engage with it to complete the work. I’ve explored ideas through making. I invite people to get engaged with the ideas but only through that engagement, have the ideas a kind of valid outcome or work and there’ll be objects I display in a traditional Western gallery as part of, you know, getting through my doctorate and, and, and, and that’s expected part of a kind of academic framework but the objects aren’t complete until they’re made with others. You know, and I hope that the community will embrace part of this as a ritual or as a ceremony or as part of their own our language for dealing with trauma rather than it being something I’ve, you know, I am necessary within. Hopefully the, the, the concept is helpful for others and spreads to other artists and other makers and other communities. And, and that’s part of that larger process of contributing to the river of Blakademic study.
How do you intend to add your voice to the rising tide of Blakademia?
I do that on the shoulders and backs of others. You know, there are many Blak warriors in the academic world who are making our voices and asserting our needs and our knowledge systems and the strength of them. I’m privileged to be part of that. I’m privileged to work with with what’s happening here. But also, you know, I have commune communion with people at La Trobe and at Macquarie and at Deakin University. There’s this kind of growing swell of folk who are asserting our knowledge systems and our belief systems into the world of knowledge and recognition. So I intend to be part of that in a small way if I can. It’s exciting and it’s also tricky. There’s an endless list, I guess, just from mob people like Julie Gough and Trawoolway people, Greg Lehman, Jody Haines (note: Dominic realised later that he mistakenly listed Jody Haines as Trawoolway: she is palawa), Lauren Tynan, are all Blakademics doing work who are Trawoolway, they’re the same mob as me. And it’s amazing. Neika Lehman… is this amazing proliferation of Trawoolway Blakademics that are doing great work. So I always admire them, there’s the cohort of HDR students I’m with and they’re doing incredible work. I guess that, but it’s endless, you know, Marcia Langton’s been a hero of mine for a very long time. Those sorts of contexts and people are, you know, Vicki Couzens with Gunditjmara, working with Jody Haines, incredible stuff. So I’m really interested in how I can contribute, how I can help, how I can motivate, I guess, those obligations. And I guess, yeah, I guess create a safer place for others to come into this space.
Are there other aspects of your research you want to mention that have not been covered by the interview so far?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess the other the real thing is that I’m building on others. This isn’t my own work. This is the work of generations of cultural assertion of of fighting of painful painstaking understanding comprehension and thought. And I’m part of that. But I’m only a tiny part and I guess that that’s one of the clear things that I’m. And I’m really humbled by the company around me and excited to be part of what they’re doing and contribute in my own way. So yeah, I guess that’s the other part of this is is that it’s a collective of work and it goes from education all the way across to the arts to engineering to science. It’s not just one particular form of thought.