Renowned contemporary artist Newell Harry says his creativity stems from liking to keep his hands busy.
“I made ashtrays for my dad from clay from the local creek when I was a kid, that was in Perth,” Harry told AAP.
But the archive of articles, posters, photographs and old brochures featured in his solo exhibition, Esperanto, tell a story that goes even further back.
They include newspaper clippings his grandmother collected about anti-apartheid protests in South Africa, dictation tests used for the White Australia policy, and copies of the onboard publication from the Italian liner that took his pregnant mother from Durban to Fremantle in Western Australia, where Harry was born in 1972.
The family had escaped apartheid in South Africa, where they were categorised as “coloured” for their Mauritian roots.
Esperanto takes its name from a language engineered in the late 1800s that became a universal second language that today is spoken by about 100,000 people, mostly in Europe.
“I’m interested in this period of the late 1960s to 1970s in Australian history where there’s quite a sense of, I think, progressivism, but also Afro-Pacific solidarity,” Harry told AAP.
In Esperanto, viewers are invited to consider perspectives and understandings of groups excluded from Western knowledge systems through a collection of personal and historical items belonging to Harry’s family and collected during his travels in the Indo-Pacific, South Africa and Australia.
The exhibition also investigates the upper echelons of Anglo-Australian society’s historical need for approval from the United Kingdom and Europe.
“I always find that funny, this sort of need, predominantly for Anglo-Australian students to … get certified in the northern hemisphere,” Harry said.
“My work has probably been shown more in the northern hemisphere than here, so there’s an irony in that.”
The items, intentionally placed throughout a scaffold network that nods to Harry’s Australian bricklayer stepfather, send the viewer on a journey through separate yet interconnected histories, where they have to choose their path through the exhibition and circle back to take everything in.
Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) acting director Michael Moran said Esperanto contained at least 20 hours of content for viewers.
“It’s a show that you’d be able to come back to, and you’d be able to research really and get quite deep into,” Mr Moran told AAP.
Esperanto is MAMA’s first solo offering since the gallery was revamped in 2019.
“It’s an ambitious show. It’s a big one,” he said.
Esperanto runs until November 26 at MAMA.