Debuted @ 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Free/State, The Art Gallery of South Australia

Installed @ Queer Encounters 2023, The Art Gallery of New South Wales

 

Casting Shadows [chandelier] draws from Dennis Golding’s memory of a warm light spilling through the Victorian-era iron lacework of the balconies on the terrace houses of Redfern at dusk, illuminating a gathering of people below. The decorative railings cast their entwined shadows across Eveleigh, Louis, Caroline and Vine streets, tracing the perimeter of the area known as ‘The Block’. Developed in the 1970s, The Block provided affordable housing to Aboriginal people in inner Sydney, becoming a place for communities to come together, as well as a site of political action.

 

This was where Golding grew up, and the stories of this place, recounted in conversations with family and community, are embedded in this work. He utilises the material fragments of the iron lacework balconies as a way to remember the structures that he called home, but also to recast representations of The Block and of those who lived there. Fences that once demarcated land and people now form the scaffold of a chandelier, its glow emulating that of a fire, inviting community to gather around it once more.