The Golden Mile
D Harding

The Golden Mile was D Harding’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne, and expanded upon a central mode of practice developed over previous years by the artist, working with members of family and connecting to and embedding an ancestral lineage in his storytelling. Working within a reductionist palette of natural yellow ochre using dry pigments mixed with natural binders, Harding and familial collaborators have worked on a series of canvases in Brisbane where the artist is based. In this form the works have been transported to Melbourne and sequentially installed upon the gallery walls. Thereafter, all discernible images are obliterated, culminating in the eradication of the works utilising the white paint of the gallery. Through this, the paintings remained merely as a trace of the performative enactment of their erasure, as if to be residual rectangular stencils of an act unseen. Repositioned in the gallery as now whitewashed paintings, these erased works remained as echoes of an act that is not one of violence or censor, but rather, a respectful acknowledgement of the artist presenting work in a place, on country, that he does not have direct connection to.