Tiyan Baker

About the work

Artist Statement:

nyatu’ maanǔn mungut bigabu (2021) first exhibited at Private Island, an Artist’s Run Initiative at Girls School Gallery in Boorloo (Perth), WA in October 2021. nyatu’ maanǔn mungut bigabu (2021) then won the 2022 National Photography Prize and exhibited at Murray Art Museum Albury, NSW.

These four photographic prints use images taken on Bidayǔh native lands in Sarawak, in rivers where Baker’s mother played as a child and on ancestral farm lands.

These images are autostereograms, also known as Magic Eye images, a nostalgic optical illusion technology that was very popular in the 1990s during the artist’s childhood. Embedded in these images are forgotten or rarely used Bidayǔh words that are about wandering, collecting and foraging.

Serian Bidayǔh language has hundreds of terms for activities that speak to a daily rhythm of moving through the jungle and working intimately with plant life. In current semi-Industrialised Bidayǔh society, these words are almost never used and have been left behind. These images are incantations to evoke the old knowledge these words hold. They suggest that if we learn to see the natural world in a slightly different way, we can access another way of knowing and moving.

nyatu’ (to collect fallen fruit),

maanǔn (found all over the place in plenty),

mungut (to pick only the young buds), 

bigabu (to walk through water)

 

Coding by Xavier Burrow

Graphic design assistance by Alanna Roy Bentley

Photo by Jeremy Weihrauch.