As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, UQ Art Museum has commissioned a new sculptural work by Koa, Kuku Yalanji, Meriam Mer and South Sea Islander artist Keemon Williams. The new work, designed to be exhibited outdoors, will be showcased at events including the upcoming St Lucia Block Party. UQ Art Museum curator Kyle Weise has contributed this essay that explores Williams' new commission.
I’m sure we’re taller in another dimension (2026) consists of two custom-made inflatables, suggesting the shape and colour of eucalyptus gum trees, their towering height pointing to the historical, cultural and environmental significance of the trees that they mimic. Positioned upright and filled with air by motorized fans at their base, these inflatable forms are a modification of the design of ‘air dancers’: tubular figures with long arms that are often placed on the roadside to draw attention to retail businesses, their energetic and silly movement attracting the gaze of people occupying passing cars.
The nylon surface of the inflatables evokes the distinctive white pallor of the ghost gum and is embellished with bright-pink airbrushed squiggles that recall the textures and marking of a scribbly gum. The reproduction of these tree-like forms within the guise of a tool of marketing draws attention to the landscape of this continent as one for sale: an environment leveraged in the service of capitalist consumption. In previous works, Williams has used the form of souvenir-store boomerangs, reconstructed in aluminum, plastic and ceramic, to emphasise the commodification of Aboriginal culture in developing national identity. [1] Since early colonisation, the gum tree, via artistic representation, has had a similarly important place in the iconography of national identity.
John Glover (1767-1849) was perhaps the first settler-artist to aesthetically focus on the specificity of the eucalyptus and its contrast to European trees.[2] However, it was the later Hans Heysen (1877-1968), a German émigré, who is cited as the key figure in elevating the specificity of the gum tree in Australian landscape painting. Art historian Ian McLean writes, “Heysen hit upon the gnarled gum tree as a national symbol, his paintings caught the imagination of the Australian art world and its public. […] Heysen made his eucalypti a national totem. [3] In the UQ collection, Heysen’s influence is evident in the style and subject of landscape paintings by Penleigh Boyd (1890-1923), Harold Parker (1873-1962) [4] and Gunai/Kurnai artist Ronald Bull (1942-1979), for example. Bull is represented in the UQ Art Collection by the haunting painting Untitled (Landscape) (1974). As a young child, Bull was inspired by Heysen’s work and he would later study informally under the artist. [5] In Untitled (Landscape), gum trees, alongside their remnants and reflections gathered in and around a waterhole, are the focus. Standing amidst a muted backdrop, Bull depicts the trees as ghostly sentinels in softly faded and foggy landscape: a delicate portrait of these beings.
Art historian Sylvia Kleinert writes that, for Bull, raised and working under assimilationist policies, European-style landscape painting was a path to recognition and mainstream acceptance. For settler Australians, landscape paintings depicting towering gum trees were a symbol of national identity, and encouraged the commodification of the land through a static and disconnected sense of place. By contrast, for Bull, this style was an expression and affirmation of his love for place, for Country. [6] Williams’ work grapples with this complex history of the gum tree in landscape painting, where the form is both revered and colonized, separated from place and people.
In Heysen’s paintings, gum trees are often gigantic forms, with storybook-like proportions that lean towards the fantastic and mythical, with an overwhelming statue-esque stillness. [7] In the mid-20th century, Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira’s (1902-1959) watercolour renderings of the ghost gums of Central Australia would introduce a new style and bring forward immense cultural emphasis on the gum tree as a living icon, from an Indigenous perspective. Mclean writes: “Namatjira would create an Arrernte version of Heysen’s totemic evocations of Eucalyptus and desert topography that captured the imagination of the Australian public.” [8] Whilst there are some tonal connections to the later watercolours Heysen produced in the Flinders Ranges, Namatjira’s ghost gums are distinct, and aesthetically and conceptually distant, from Heysen. Here, bold white forms are starkly outlined against the contrasting colours of the surrounding site, land and sky. The ghost gums in Namatjira’s work often move further into the centre of the picture than trees in a typical Western composition, which might treat them simply as a framing device. [9] Namatjira’s ghost gums are alive, with what Ian Burn describes as their “slow meandering trunks” that are “merging, wandering serpent like, a giant pathway or incision across the landscape”. [10] It is this vitality, this bodily and organic connotation, that is emphasised in Williams’ animated inflatable forms.
Namatjira’s work famously combined Arrernte knowledge and identity with Western artistic traditions. During his lifetime, this left Namatjira (like Bull) popular and widely seen, yet relatively unacknowledged by major art museums. Again, McLean is instructive: “Australia failed Namatjira because its national art galleries considered his Western-looking style proof of his art’s inauthenticity, as if it was both fake Aboriginal and fake Western art.” [11] The impossible bind of ‘authenticity’ is one that overtly occupies Williams. Reflecting on his boomerang works, Williams has noted, “So, if you purchase my boomerangs that are deliberately fake you’re left with a neat little paradox. They’re not ‘real’ looking at all, but they are made by real and very annoyed blak hands.” [12] I’m sure we’re taller in another dimension continues this oscillation between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’, as the work expresses an Indigenous perspective within the language of the commodity, by commandeering the materials of a thoroughly commercialised visual culture for its own ends.
Arrernte artists who have subsequently continued to produce works in the tradition of Namatjira’s watercolours have embellished this style in the context of the commodification and exploitation of the landscape. Emblematic here are works in the UQ collection including, Danger – Mining (2016) and Mining on Our Country, NT (2016) by Gloria Napurrurla Pannka (1949-2020) and Mining is Ruining Our Beautiful Countryside (2016) by Kathy Inkamala. The central Australian landscapes depicted by Inkamala and Pannka place signs and tools of extractive and destructive industries (a dump truck, signs warning of poison and explosives) alongside prominently-placed ghost gums, which read as adversaries of industry, protecting the landscape. In Williams’ work, as in these Arrernte artists, the gum tree is part of a relational language with Country and visual symbol that highlights both exploitation of the landscape, and the potential for resistance to this. His temporary, movable synthetic ‘trees’ draw attention to the entanglement of their surrounds within ongoing processes of the disruption, extraction and reorganisation of the life and landscape of this continent. Introduced grasses and trees from around the planet sit alongside these inflatable ‘trees’, synthesised from global supply chains. Any 21st century garden in which Williams’ sculptures are placed is as constructed and introduced to this place – as much a product of capitalist globalisation – as the synthetic, electrically powered sculptures. Thrusting themselves into this place, Williams’ large, bright and noisy sculptural ‘trees’, designed by blak hands, assert not just survival, but the flourishing of contemporary indigenous identity against the bounds and manners of the colonial garden-scape.
I’m sure we’re taller in another dimension is closely connected to a computer-animated moving image work by Williams, Who will touch the sky when tomorrow too is stolen? (2025). Here, an animated tube dancer, with markings akin to the inflatables, stands alone, slowly moving in an empty barren landscape where it is the only form of ‘life’. The lone inflatable figure alludes to the treatment of this land as being akin to that of a sales-yard: reduced to a place of commerce, to be used, consumed and abandoned. Life-sustaining trees are replaced by a flaccid piece of plastic. Yet there is also a pathos in this figure, as it tries to stay upright and afloat, keeping a smile in difficult circumstances.
I’m sure we’re taller in another dimension continues to explore this anthropomorphic element of the air dancers. The synthetic surface acts like a skin, or a mask, supporting the temporary creation of these figures, as they move from a crumpled pile of fabric to a bold character. These characters are subject to the whim of forces beyond their control as they are generated and animated by both ambient wind and the fan at their base. Failure and hope collide as the artificial bodies fight to sustain themselves, their noisy motors work tirelessly to avoid the skin from crumbling, tumbling to the ground in a wrinkled heap. This noise, and their almost violent, frenetic movement, distinguishes these sculptural forms from the silent, gentle animated figure in Who will touch the sky when tomorrow too is stolen?. Indeed, the moments of turning the inflatable sculptures ‘off’ and ‘on’ are not peripheral to the ‘work itself’ but are dramatic moments of ascendance and collapse that further anthropomorphises the figures, and is an indispensable part of their being.
Significantly, and in contrast to the computer-generated animation that preceded it, I’m sure we’re taller in another dimension adds a second figure: the sculpture is a non-identical pair. There is a bodily anthropomorphism in the inflatable sculptures that links back to the Namatjira and is accentuated by this doubling. Here, their movements and coupling suggest a pair of dancers, or even lovers. This is further emphasised by the title of the work, which is a lyric from “White Ferrari”, a track on Frank Ocean’s generation-defining album Blonde (2016):
If you think about it, it'll be over in no time
And that's life (Love)
Love (Love)
I'm sure we're taller in another dimension
You say we're small and not worth the mention
You're tired of movin', your body's achin'
We could vacay, there's places to go
Clearly, this isn't all that there is […]
But we're so okay here (We're fine), we're doing fine (We're fine)
“White Ferrari” is a melancholy ode to a love that once-was, holding on to its final moments and remembering this:
I care for you still, and I will forever
That was my part of the deal, honest
We got so familiar
Spending each day of the year
White Ferrari, good times
The song, like the work, wavers between disillusionment, nostalgia and hope. These inflatable figures move together and apart, both violent and soft as they desperately seek equilibrium.
The bright-pink airbrushed scribbles, drawn by Williams onto the surface of the figures, waver between hard lines and soft ethereal forms and add a playful element to the work. There is a mimetic element to this, recreating the distinctive abstract lines made by insects on the bark of the scribbly gum. But the airbrushed rendering of these lines also gestures toward the way that this tree, with its soft surface amenable to engraving, becomes a forum for human scribbles and marks: a place where love, confessions and limerence are inscribed in initials and symbols (
4 EVA). I’m sure we’re taller in another dimension contends with the reality of an exploited landscape for sale and the collusion of colonial landscape paintings within this. However, alongside this there is playfulness and an embrace of possibility, as we try to make sense of, assert ourselves in, and leave a mark on, the circumstances in which we are placed.
Kyle Weise is a Curator at University of Queensland Art Museum.
Keemon Williams is a Koa, Kuku Yalanji, Meriam Mer and South Sea Islander artist whose work grapples with contemporary Indigenous identity in the context of hyper-consumption.
