Traces of Now D HARDING

panning, criss-crossing, collapsing, multi-directional – these are some of the temporal adjectives I reach for to begin to describe D Harding’s recent works. A Brisbane-based artist of the Bidjara, Ghungalu, and Garingbal peoples of Central Queensland, Harding’s work has a kind of interlacing historical consciousness that is hard to pin down. Temporality has long been a major theme considered in relation to Australian Indigenous contemporary artists’ practices, with historians and writers reaching for terms to describe complex temporal workings – from artists working within Indigenous ontologies and connections to deep, ancestral or eternal time-spans, to forms of revitalising cultural practices, to referencing the catastrophic disruption of colonisation and new temporal orders, to the time of the archive and the artwork as surfacing suppressed histories. Yet our language on these practices can