Dominique Chen is a Gamilaraay woman, and interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator. She is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. Her research areas include Indigenous Art and Indigenous Research Methodologies, and applied relational creative practices as they relate to the care of people and Country, including land management and cultural food growing. Dominique is a mother, writer, maker and avid gardener, and is passionate about the role of creative practice in making positive contributions to community, culture and Country. She is a co-founder of Aboriginal-run not-for-profit, Yuruwan, an organisation which supports learning opportunities for culturally-centred, urban-based food and medicine growing; and co-founder of The Blak Laundry, a collaborative performance/installation work with Ngugi Quandamooka artist Libby Harward.

Image to come from Dom

How has collaboration across disciplines shaped your work and/or practice?
Coming from a cultural context that is innately interdisciplinary, or rather, undisciplinary, and that doesn’t always map neatly onto, or into Western disciplinary definitions and boundaries, working across disciplines often seems a more natural process for me, and a way of leaning into and working strongly from a culturally grounded space. Collaboration across disciplines lets me access more fully a relational way of being and knowing that sit at the heart of much of my practice.

When you bring together different ways of working and looking, you get multiple perspectives and multiple entry points into the same questions, which is vitally important. I also find that interdisciplinary work can be quite freeing—sometimes disciplines, with their epistemological and methodological histories, can have the propensity to become self-referential and self-limiting, setting up their own parameters for what is truthful, or what is valuable, or what is normative. Working across and beyond those harder disciplinary boundaries can loosen these insular perspectives and ways of working, and open things up in ways that feel liberating, not just intellectually but creatively and culturally.

Image to come from Dom

Which film, book, exhibition or moment shifted the way you see the world?
I’m not sure there’s been a single work or moment that’s changed my worldview, which is something that I was born into, and have shaped over time. But there are two creative works that do come to mind that felt really impactful for me at the time. The first was seeing Baraka (1992), Ron Fricke’s non-narrative documentary film, which I saw in my late teens. I haven’t watched it for over two decades, and I’m not sure if all of the many representations of Indigenous peoples throughout would hold up if I watched it again, but the way in which it brought a strong, sharp and witnessing lens to the abuse of the environment for the sake of production, capital and commodity, really hit hard for me as a young person, just waking up to majority ways of being in the world.

The second was Archie Moore’s exhibition 1970–2018 at Griffith University Art Museum in 2018. The work was profoundly impactful on me—Archie’s conjuring of a psychological architecture that you could inhabit, reconfiguring the usual institutional gallery space and its control and curation of gaze and proximity, and notions of objectivity. The felt ownership and self-determination of Archie guiding that (oftentimes difficult) experience was really empowering for me as an Aboriginal person, and opened up space in myself for the possibilities of experiential, embodied and spatial practice alongside the visual and two dimensional. In retrospect, the experience of Archie’s work has inspired and softly guided much of my subsequent practice, and thinking around the importance of space, containers and place-based contexts.

Archie Moore, 1970 – 2018 exhibition installation view, Griffith University Art Museum, 2018. Photograph Carl Warner.

Who would be your dream collaborator and what would you want to create together?
My dream collaborators are always my community and Country. In terms of what I would want to create, I think the impulse to decide what to create before you’ve started on that collaborative journey is somewhat counterintuitive to how I understand collaboration. For me, the real exciting and powerful parts of collaboration are that you don’t know what the sum of your parts are going to equal, and the value of that deep connecting, and together processing, and asking what is in both of our hearts and minds in this particular time and place…what stories need to be told. So perhaps another way to say that, is the thing I want to create together is the relationship and collaborative process. The relationship is the project, as they say.

If I did have to speak directly to the question, in a broad sense, I want to create work that is meaningful, generative and has genuine, tangible and reciprocal outcomes for people and Country. Not just work whose benefit flows one way into galleries, into institutions, or ends up purely as someone else’s cultural capital and commodity. I’m deeply interested in applied creative practice and outcomes that revitalise culture, foster connection, and are healing, reparative and regenerative.

Image to come from Dom

What’s next on your horizon — a project, an idea, a wild experiment?
This question really makes me think about how in my current circumstance, having the physical and mental time and space for wild experimentation feels like a real privilege. The daily grind is real, and it sometimes feels difficult to disconnect from constant deadlines, deliverables and continual and expected outcomes to play. True experimentation, in the mainstream socio-cultural and economic systems we find ourselves in, unfortunately needs time/space/money resourcing.

In saying all of that, what Libby and I are trying to prioritise this year as part of our collaborative practice, is rest. Not doing anything, giving ourselves that time and space to digest and process all that we’ve done, and feel deeply into what comes next. So the next project is rest, and a space to be productive and generative in a way that isn’t about output, but about regeneration and nurturing some of the roots and foundations of our practice together.

How do you see your work contributing to new ways of thinking or creating in the world?
As an academic, as well as a creative practitioner, I often find a strange kind of tension about positioning my work as new or novel, given that much of my practice and ways of being and creating come from my cultural contexts, values and ethics, which are themselves old ways of being and creating. Holding on to those values and cultural contexts, especially the parts that are deeply relational and relationship affirming and enabling, seem to feel ‘novel’ in physical, intellectual and emotional environments that are increasingly disconnecting, individualistic and dissociating. I’m personally not of the view that we need to keep striving for the perpetually ‘new’ in everything, which I think ties into connected conversations around capitalism, perpetual growth, ‘progress’ and ‘innovation’. For me, newness and innovation come from proper listening, connecting, coherence with each other, time and space to feel and respond to those feelings independent of what is required or expected of us in a creative output sense. I think technology and technological production and innovation falls into this category as well. I hope that my work demonstrates the value of creativity in every and all moments, not just in ‘art’ or ‘science’ spaces. 

Image to come from Dom

What do you think of when you think about ANAT?
I find there can be a real blindness or deafness in some institutional spaces when it comes to genuine interdisciplinary work, particularly between science and creative practice. Often, creative practice gets positioned as purely science communication, a way to make research accessible to a public audience. Or science becomes a subject matter for artists to reference rather than a truly integrated way of thinking, making, being, and working together.

The work of ANAT is genuinely valuable in holding space for something more enmeshed and collaborative, beginning to peel away at the layers of what true art-science collaboration and interdisciplinary practice can mean. We are fast moving into social and environmental spaces that we need this more than ever, or as the late science-fiction writer Ursula Le Guin states, “Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless ‘information’ that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.”