Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Sam Harrison presents “Kin’O’Centrism” at the Cairns Art Gallery. The exhibition questions the entanglement of the self not simply with others, but with the world, and indeed existence.
In Kin’o’centrism, Harrison proposes an Indigenous cosmological model of kinship, where relations unfold across the human, animal, botanical, celestial, and spiritual worlds – and beyond. It is a model grounded in non-linear time; time is cyclic and immemorial. Kinship, then, is not something that simply happens across time, but deeply with, and within, time. Harrison foregrounds Indigenous understandings of time, where the past, present, and future ceaselessly commingle.
The apex to the exhibition is the Eclipse series (2026), an assemblage of tessellating lightboxes where scenes of secular and cultural life are rendered within cosmological cycles. This series articulates a universal Indigenous understanding of relationality and responsibility, where care for Community and Country is mutually realised.
- Sam Harrison, Kamilaroi and Wiradjuri, b. 1996, Moon Crossing from the Eclipse series, 2026, laser cut wood light box and acrylic paint, 60 x 52 x 7 cm, edition of 10, © courtesy of the artist and Onespace, image: Louis Lim.