Artist Robert Andrew, a descendant of the Yawuru people in Western Australia, brings modern technology into a practice that tells stories passed down from his ancestors about the history of the land and its water while contemplating his personal roots, language, and memories. His works gradually reveal the intrinsic nature and internal character concealed beneath overlapping strata. This process parallels the artist’s exploration of his Indigenous identity, observing how this identity is suppressed by or is incongruent to the Western education and value systems that he has been subject to since childhood.

Andrew made two monolithic structures with Seto clay for Aichi Triennale 2025. What Lies Within slowly pulls string to unearth layers of clay, pigment, and soil. The string trembles, spiraling around a structure on the wall to create a living woven form. Language in Buru slowly drips water to erode a clay and soil structure, revealing a Yawuru language word, Buru,* that was gifted to the artist by his Elders. This word captures the philosophical and cultural relationship that Yawuru people have to their Country, the seasons, and time—which echoes across the many First Nations language groups that make up Australia. Buru articulates a knowledge and approach that permeates all aspects of Andrew’s artwork.

The Kasen Mine site that is the venue for these installations was acquired by a ceramicist early in the twentieth century as a source of clay, and is still a clay plant today. Andrew’s clay structures erode and crumble over the course of the triennale. Observing that process, even for only a brief moment, helps us to think about how to look back and review the past, to imagine the future that extends from that past, and to wonder what will remain at the end of the process.

* Buru: A Yawuru Ngan-ga (Yawuru language) word meaning “everything around you that you can see from the earth to the sky and also time.”