Alana Hunt’s work Four small trees almost in a line was a finalist in the Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery's signature program, Still: National Still Life Award. In 2017, this award was expanded from having a focus solely on still life painting to include artworks in all mediums. As a moving-image artwork, Four small trees almost in a line signals a very contemporary interpretation of the still life genre and a new direction for the gallery's collection. In fact, it is the first moving-image artwork to be donated to the collection. The still life genre is the specialist focus of the Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery’s collection, with still life artworks identified as the first priority in the gallery’s collection policy, Section 2.4.2 (1): “Works in this section reflect the still life genre, as per artworks acquired through the National Still Life Award (Still) as well as through donation, purchase, transfer and bequest.”

Alana Hunt lives and works on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia. She is a conceptual artist who works in interdisciplinary ways with video, words, photography, collage, the internet, conversation, food, and the media. One of her most comprehensive bodies of work is the “participatory memorial” Cups of nun chai (2010-2016) that emerged from the violent protests of Kashmir’s Summer of 2010. An interactive project founded in conversation, she has presented various iterations—exhibitions, readings, public discussions and lectures—of Cups of nun chai at arts festivals and events internationally. The project won the 2017 Incinerator Award for Art and Social Change (Melbourne), was nominated for an Infinity Award with the International Centre for Photography (New York, 2017), and highly commended by The Blake Prize (Sydney, 2013).

Four small trees almost in a line is a short video filmed on Miriwoong country that gently probes questions of agency, received notions of ownership and the location of meaning in places. In leading the viewer to think through their own understanding of place, it highlights ongoing and unquestioned structures of colonisation and ingrained beliefs, particularly the right to access land, which is so unconsciously held by most non-Indigenous people in Australia. It is one of a series of video works she has been making around the past and present of the town where she lives.

[Written by Jo Besley, 15 March 2019]

Video, 2 min 45 sec.