In an adjacent room, Buttrose has curated the recent work of a much younger, blak queer artist, Matthew Harris, described as ‘a Sagittarius born in Wangaratta of mixed European and Koorie descent’. In a combative, fractured and overpopulated social media environment, where algorithms and a frightening thing called ‘the attention economy’ are attuned to violence, cruelty and other base human instincts, Harris makes broad gestural statements about love and intimacy. What might have once seemed asinine or gauche – an oversized possum skin heart – can feel revolutionary, a soothing tonic in such a frayed, loveless and transactional world, one driven by glitching, personality-disordered machines and grief-counselling AI models.

Harris’s work Day After Day, 2024, mediates the space between love and violence, implying both and holding both in suspense, as harding does in Breaking boundaries , 2022 and 2026. Atop a plush possum skin sits a box-like rectangular form, a monumental bronze sculpture. On closer inspection, the form hides two human figures, who appear to be unaware of the world around them as they shelter in the refuge of their love.

This is assured love, not clinging, desperate need. The figures, based on Brancusi’s lovers, are so enmeshed as to be almost subsumed into one body, yet each retains its separate identity. Their unwavering embrace – quite possibly their last – is unquestionably mutual and their interlocked forms mirror each other almost exactly. There is no dissonance in their song; only harmony. Yet one figure nurses a carbuncle, or a malignant growth in the shape of a perfect sphere – an antique cannonball wedged deep into the bronze. The tension is frozen at the precise moment of impact, and it may be that the figures have been struck by a cannonball fired from the ships of the British invasion force.

The artist writes in his notes to the curator that ‘[t]he jury is still out as to whether kissing existed in this country before Europeans arrived, but the figures are clinging to each other for dear life despite the brutal interruption’. I have no doubt that we kissed, and much like the false cultural precedent argument used to deny sexual diversity prior to invasion, I don’t need proof. We kissed, and where I come from we made crowns of feathers to adorn the heads of those we loved.

Harris is not afraid to use the traditional medium of ochre, which also had multiple ritual and ceremonial uses in cultural practice in southeastern Australia. This precious commodity was mined along the eastern seaboard and traded via networks of exchange for millennia. Harris’s big statement piece in Yield Strength might be his ‘star painting’, Big Time, 2025, along with an older work on loan from a private collection. ‘With so much doom and gloom in the world and in my own work I wanted to try being a bit more optimistic’, Harris writes in his curatorial notes:

The big star painting [Big Time] is a glimpse 65,000 years into the future looking east at dawn. I use various sciencey [computer modelling] programs to project forward and predict what will be where. Only the empty space around the stars is painted with pink-purple ochre, the stars themselves are just the empty canvas beneath.

This reorientation of the night sky, tracking the dark, apparently empty, spaces rather than the celestial bodies, is highly significant: an entire way of seeing, of navigating the darkness and orienting towards home, which is predicated on fundamentally different rules. Harris’s evocative 3D sculptural work Baparra-banarrak, 2022, features quite a prop – a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite, suspended from the ceiling as if streaking across the sky, its tail replaced by that of a possum (kindly donated by its former owner). It is a lyrical statement about human insignificance, weighed against the longevity that the continent has sustained – where time is not counted in seconds, minutes and hours, but eons, eras and epochs – in a universe ruled by the principles of flux and stasis. As Harris explains:

Between the meteorite sculpture and the star painting, they cover a huge expanse of time. Honestly, who knows if humans will still be around then but I’m trying to be optimistic here. Forget about car accidents and heart disease, surely time is the number one killer in the universe.

Perhaps with such a prop, the viewer is being led to an artificial experience of wonder, to simply be awed by the momentary irruption of a cosmic weather event 4.5 billion years ago and the mark it left, and how even the world’s oldest continuing cultures are eclipsed by geological time.