Robert Andrew

TIARNEY MIEKUS:

Your most well-known works use machinery, ochre, oxides and water to reveal what’s often a Yawuru word on a gallery wall. The first was in 2013 and revealed “Mimi”, which is “mother’s mother”. It set a trajectory for the next 10 years, but how did that work come about?

ROBERT ANDREW

It definitely has. It started when I had my studio at home, a little room, and the mechanism was built there for my Honours year. I was looking at language and education, particularly my own education, and the layers that have been built up within Australian history—the colonisers’ history that has been covered up. And going back to my own childhood at primary school, there were blackboards and chalk. I wasn’t very good at English subjects, but I started off in my studio with a blackboard and those ideas about writing and rewriting over and over again, which is the idea of palimpsest where you still have that imagery of what lays behind.

So, I had a chalkboard and I was trying to build up layers of chalk and I was using either the water pistol we used to spray the cats when they were doing bad things, or a squirty bottle—and it was spraying onto the blackboard to remove