James Tylor Turrangka...in the shadows
Reading Country
Turrangka…in the shadows is the culmination of James Tylor’s first decade of practice. The Kaurna Miyurna word ‘Turrangka’ contains a multiplicity of meanings. ‘Turra’ means shadow or shade, but is also used to mean image, mirror and reflection. Tylor’s work bridges historical and contemporary photographic processes – from film and digital photography to daguerreotypes – to explore his Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna), Māori (Te Arawa) and multi-cultural European ancestry. He crafts his images from light and darkness.
At the core of Tylor’s practice is a language of intervention, disrupting the image to remove or reveal visual information. He systematically alters readings of Country through either excising information from photographic prints or inscribing motifs, language and place names onto the surface of his images. He alternately highlights, hand-colours, deletes, redacts, punctures, perforates or burns the photographic surface. These strategies are at the service of exploring the suppression and erasure of Aboriginal cultural history from the Australian landscape through the ongoing legacy of colonialism.
Un-resettling 2013–17, Tylor’s earliest series of hand-coloured photographs, document and reclaim traditional Kaurna cultural practices largely lost through colonisation. Tylor systematically learnt these practices on Country – from building dwellings and land markers to constructing snares and traps, and crafting tools and weapons for hunting. In this series, he recreates these actions and happenings for the camera, recording them for posterity, before printing and carefully hand-colouring each image. Dwellings, Hauntings, Huntings, and Happenings are Tylor’s means of recovering First Nations memory and practices from the past and repatriating them back to Country and into the present. Coby Edgar, First Nations writer, curator and Tylor’s friend writes, [James] taught me to see my world differently. As we walked the Country of his Kaurna Ancestors, Tylor casually showed me how to read landscapes and ways to harvest barks and saplings to make objects… He provides a rich overview of the history of place and people, describing how they were colonised, and why certain tools were so effective in the process of demolishing Aboriginal existence from sight.¹
Gaps and missing knowledge also form the conceptual underpinning of Tylor’s expanded photographic installation From an Untouched Landscape 2013–18. In groupings of ‘Deleted’, ‘Erased’, ‘Removed’ and ‘Vanished’ scenes, he deliberately excises and effectively edits sections from the landscapes to draw attention to the losses and blind spots in our collective memory. Every black rectangle, square or circle where a part of the landscape is removed from the photograph becomes a vanishing point. Tylor has placed black velvet, a light-absorbing fabric, behind these holes, creating a seemingly infinite void. As Tylor says, “The removal of Aboriginal cultures due to colonisation has left the appearance that Australia was untouched before European arrival.”²
This body of work, created over five years, unites Tylor’s landscape photographs with his painted wood mudli-tools and hunting implements made by the artist – such as wirri (clubs), ipila (clap sticks), kaya (grasstree spears), and wadna (climbing sticks), which are placed alongside the photographs. Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their traditional lands for it to be sold to British colonial settlers. These communities were forced into government-owned Christian missions and were banned from speaking their language or practising culture. Tylor inserts and symbolically fills the void with a shield, a spear or a club. Where there is an absence, there is its opposite: the physical presence of an object protruding from the wall, reclaiming space and casting turra.
Tylor has done more than any other contemporary Australian artist to revive and make relevant the antiquated photographic processes of the daguerreotype, a process described “as a mirror of the world”.³
The Darkness of Enlightenment is an ongoing installation of daguerreotypes and cast bronze objects. The landscapes in Tylor’s daguerrotypes are where there was first contact between Kaurna people and European whalers and colonial settlers, contact that was often deadly for the Kaurna people and for their language and culture. The daguerreotypes are accompanied by cast bronze Kaurna artefacts and colonial objects made by the artist that represent the poorly documented interactions with Kaurna people, language and culture on the coastal colonial frontier of South Australia.
Since British colonisation, many Indigenous place names in South Australia have been replaced with Anglicised ones. Tylor’s series of daguerreotypes, We Call This Place… Kaurna Yarta 2020 capture sites of significance engraved with its Kaurna place name in cursive writing. These landscape photographs are overlaid with the Warra Kaurna language to emphasise the Kaurna Miyurna people’s rich historical and cultural connection to the region. Tylor says, “the landscape tells you what its name is.”⁴ Coby Edgar urges the viewer:
Speak the words Tylor reinserts into the landscape. Let the Ancestors of that place hear their tongue. Feel how Country resonates within your body when you are in these places and have a new knowing of place. It will change your life because you can’t abuse, neglect or ignore something you feel deeply. Knowing something forces you to hold responsibility for yourself and your community. That’s the power of Tylor’s works; he holds people accountable to history. He gives the gift of seeing the world differently and the tools to change how we relate to our environment through the act of knowing.⁵
Through this exhibition, James Tylor charts an old and new pathway through light and shadow with image and language. His turra are signs, and his mudli are land markers. The gallery is but one of the sites involved in Tylor’s project of reshaping an image of this nation. His artistic practice and cultural leadership extend far beyond the walls of the gallery. From carving a digging stick, building a dwelling, or cooking native recipes to making furniture and spaces to eat and be together, Tylor ushers in a world of images that honours the land on which they were taken and expands First Nations knowledge and language. For Tylor, everything starts on and returns us to Country. Leigh Robb Curator, Turrangka...in the shadows
Coby Edgar, ‘Artist text’, The National 4: Australian art now, Art Gallery New South Wales, www.the-national.com.au/artists/james-tylor/we-call-this-place/ (accessed 1 May 2023).
² James Tylor, James Tylor: Untouched Landscapes, N.Smith Gallery, www.nsmithgallery.com/exhibitions/94james-tylor-untouched-landscapes.-n.smith-gallery/overview/ (accessed 1 May 2023).
³ Richard Rudisill, Mirror image: The influence of the daguerreotype on American society University of New Mexico Press, 1971.
⁴ James Tylor, James Tylor: Untouched Landscapes, N.Smith Gallery, www.nsmithgallery.com/exhibitions/94james-tylor-untouched-landscapes.-n.smith-gallery/overview/ (accessed 1 May 2023).
⁵ Coby Edgar, ‘Artist text’, The National 4: Australian art now, Art Gallery New South Wales, www.the-national.com.au/artists/james-tylor/we-call-this-place/ (accessed 1 May 2023).
This publication supports the exhibition James Tylor – Turrangka...in the shadows 4 July - 14 September 2025 Text copyright ©Leigh Robb, 2023, edited: 2025, courtesy James Tylor - Turrangka... in the shadows catalogue.
Turrangka…In the shadows is a UNSW Galleries touring exhibition. This exhibition is supported by Lotterywest, Lendlease and the Navigators.
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JOHN CURTIN GALLERY
Above: James Tylor. Un-resettling (Scar Tree) 2016, Handcoloured digital print, 50 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist, N.Smith Gallery, Vivien Anderson Gallery, and GAGPROJECTS. ©James Tylor
Front: James Tylor, (Deleted scenes) From an untouched landscape 2013 (detail). Courtesy of the artist, N.Smith Gallery, Vivien Anderson Gallery, and GAGPROJECTS. Installation view: UNSW Galleries. Photograph: Jacqui Manning.
James Tylor, Self Portrait, 2021, 12.5 x 10 cm, quarter-plate daguerreotype lined with Nantu Watpa Grey Kangaroo fur; taken on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, Kamberri/Canberra with Craig Tuffin and Elisa deCourcy. Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. Image courtesy of the artist and N.Smith Gallery, Sydney.