Raf McDonald: Cars and other gifts from the sun

Overview

Displayed in a serial pattern, Raf McDonald’s cast husks of car bumpers appear as both paper lanterns and cut-out clothing patterns across the La Trobe Art Institute façade. Made from salvaged fabric – painted, then buried at a former dump turned water regeneration site on Djaara Country – Cars and other gifts from the sun registers through its materials the impact of mass production, industry, and consumption on Country, personhood, and community.

In Bendigo, McDonald continues a practice grounded in the conditions of making, with particular attention to the displacement of bodies under intersecting forces: settler-colonialism, trans-selfhood, and the alienation of workers within neoliberal labour systems. Their work consistently engages the material realities of pollution and industrial waste through a process of burying paintings at contaminated sites, relinquishing control to the staining and mould produced by chemicals in the soil. This method reframes how we consider Indigenous-settler relations in Australia: how can one account not only for their own actions, but also make visible – and work with – the material conditions and ongoing fallout of the past?