Mandy Quadrio is a Trawlwoolway Tasmanian Aboriginal woman also of European heritage. Quadrio’s exhibition Kukunna Murraweena features an austere forest of suspended steel wool sculptures. The abrasive material has been gently reworked by the artist, transforming it from a coarse tool into soft, yielding bodies and comforting shelters. The exhibition title loosely translates as ‘holding the weight of silence’. The vulval and womb-like forms of the sculptures suggest generations of maternal comfort—a copse within which we might commune safely with the past, despite colonialist attempts to scrub her and her people away.

In A black pause at the beginning, Quadrio’s first moving-image work, we are presented with incandescent filaments igniting in brilliant flashes and streams. Their intricate paths intersect, like neurons firing in a brain or stars streaming through the cosmos. The work passes us in moments of wild conflagration and silent darkness, transforming its fuel into dust. The voice of the artist and her sister, who has since passed, form the soundtrack to the work, singing and speaking to each other. Quadrio enters a dialogue with her sister, reaching into the past, bringing it into the present, inviting us to gather, sit, and stare into the fire.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that the work contains the voice of a deceased person.