Jody Rallah’s Hands-On Approach
The third galang residency recipient Jody Rallah is taking her yuggera/yugggerabul culture to the Cité internationale des arts in Paris with a touchable plan for the future.
‘Those experiences to install work and connect with communities have given me the opportunity to grow my practice, because it’s through the conversations, it’s through the yarns, it’s through the actual making and working with my hands that I learn.’
When Jody Rallah graduated with her Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art from the Queensland College of Art and Design in 2019, she was following in the footsteps of famous alumni such as Tony Albert, D Harding and Mandy Quadrio, but what she did next was quite different. She literally took off cross Country. Invited to participate in the national graduate show Hatched at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), the yuggera/yugggerabul and biri/bindal woman from Brisbane began working with PICA staff and local Noongar Elders on an installation of her ceramic coolamon vessels, floating them on a sea of sand of Noongar Country. ‘That was a real jump,’ recalls Rallah, ‘because previously I had only worked on yuggera Country. I’d only worked on my Country, only had connections with my Elders and my communities here.’
Rallah’s Coolamon Project set the template for a new working methodology that saw the young artist travel around Australia two years later, sharing her work through clay workshops for the group show Drawn by stones. ‘Being able to do that was so special,’ says Rallah, ‘because it felt there was a sense of exchange, across different Nations with different people, cultures and considerations. Desert Country, for example, is so different from Rainforest Country or Noongar Country. They’re all so different from one another. And being able to establish those connections and have those conversations – I was thrilled to be able to do that.’
