Artist's Talk and Yarning Circle - Djinjama: Defying the Grid

Join artist Dr Danièle Hromek to explore this collaborative work in a yarning circle.

Djinjama: Defying the grid, an exhibition at Canberra Museum and Gallery until Sunday 23 February.

Join us as we discuss the artistic and collaborative process behind Djinjama: Defying the grid. Spatial designer, Dr Danièle Hromek, is a Saltwater woman of the Budawang tribe of the Yuin nation, with French and Czech heritage. This exhibition was developed in collaboration with her sister and mother, and other community members. Explore the work and share your own response to it in this yarning circle.

Danièle (below left), Robyn (below centre), and Siân Hromek (below right).

Credit for exhibition images: RLDI Photography.

About the Exhibition

Djinjama: Defying the grid

Strings, wools, dyes, found objects, materials of Country. Weaving and netting.

until Sunday 23 February

Budawang (of Yuin Nation) spatial designer Dr Danièle Hromek with mother, Robyn Hromek and sister Siân Hromek, draw on their ancestors’ ancient techniques to create fishing nets that recast their ancestors back into the landscape, breaking the urban grids through a filter of culture.

Civic Square was architecturally designed in 1959 to be the new civic heart of Canberra. The original paving design featured a grid pattern that extended through to the shopping precinct around Garema Place. This installation work Defying the Grid, is a response to how those architectural grids cut across the fluid lines of ancestral Country and the nebulous boundaries of Aboriginal nations.

With the design and development of urban spaces in Australia, First Peoples were historically moved out of civic spaces to the city’s fringes. Streets were marked as boundaries restricting entry into inner city districts. Today, more First Peoples live in urban centres and cities than in remote areas.

These nets were collaboratively made, over many weeks, by the women of the Hromek family. With every knot that was tied, a story was told. Family stories of love, loss, colonisation and resilience are knotted into the fabric of the net creating many micro grids of history and memories. Listen closely and you will hear their grandmother spinning a yarn while other women in the family bustle around.

This work was created in response to 2019 Design Canberra theme ‘Utopia’. It raises the question - what may be utopic for one could be dystopic to another.