Tera Echo - Daisy Dale Collier
Blak Dot Gallery
12 July – 3 August 2025
At the gallery entrance I’m greeted by the exhibition title, Tera Echo, underscored with red ochre dragged across the wall, a handwritten epigraph of Country and kin. Beyond the partition wall, the room is painted black like a night sky turned inside out; holding a constellation of eight small works, they become fragments of a story thrown against the dark. One work, Reserve, sits on a plinth near the centre of the room, a kangaroo tail spilling out of a duffel bag stamped ‘RESERVE BANK OF AUSTRALIA.’ Another assemblage, Yard Stick, leans against the far wall: painted eucalyptus branches tangled in twisted, rusty wire. The staggered drumbeats of Bang Bang, made from recycled plastic, kangaroo hide, and electronic devices, attached to concrete clap sticks, ripple through the air like a heartbeat in slow motion. These materials speak to me of a place where nature and violence meet, hauntingly familiar but difficult to discern, much like the scattered works of this exhibition.
Feeling adrift in the dark and unable to put into words the weight in my chest, I sink into a low bench facing two screens huddled in a corner. Field Dressing, a two-channel audio/video work, unspools with a haunting soundscape that drifts between distorted sirens and songs of mourning, syncopated with Bang Bang’s dull thuds. The screen on the left shows kangaroos slipping in and out of static, while the screen to the right tells a story through subtitles on a black screen. I follow the narrative thread: Daisy riding shotgun in Uncle Phil’s old Valiant, driving past paddocked fields. They come across an Eastern Grey, its hind legs tangled in a fence and its lifeless body twisted over — a mammalian brother whose small wants were met with steel. They stop to free the ‘roo, limp like a marionette cut from its strings, and lay it on the ground.
The exhibition pamphlet reveals that these works were made while reflecting on the Australian government’s Kangaroo Harvest Management Plan. A quick browse through the government website tells me that this program authorises and regulates commercial kangaroo harvesting in Victoria, claiming to ensure ecological sustainability, humane practices, and that harvesting is carried out by authorised people. Yet, even with professional harvesters, I find it difficult to see how shooting dead a sentient being in the heart or head could ever be considered humane, and it feels absurd that ‘ecological sustainability’ is invoked only now, after settlers turned Aboriginal hunting grounds, foraging areas, and sacred sites into paddocked fields, irrigation enabling the boom of kangaroo populations. The Kangaroo Harvest Management Plan — the kangaroo culling program — reminds us that our survival is linked to violence, an acknowledgment that seems to linger with each piece.
Reading the works alongside the state’s regulation of kangaroo populations, I can’t help but to see them constellating through the structures of state-sanctioned violence. Langi Kal Kal and Marngoneet, two paintings named after correctional facilities in Wadawurrung Country, present looping lines that resemble barbed wire fences. Slammer, what seems like a salvaged school fence adorned with a kangaroo incisor necklace, reinforces a sense of enclosure while hinting at other institutions of control. Burial Rites, red ochre pressed into a concrete slab, gestures towards Country, alongside the limestone we extract and the communities displaced in the process. Reading them together, I see in this layering of carceral cultures, anthropogenic violence, and ongoing colonial efforts how labels — such as ‘pest,‘ criminal,’ or ‘terra nullius’ — are mobilised to justify the confinement, control, and erasure of both human and non-human lives.
My mind wanders to the inexhaustible list of fragile lives that society overlooks, pushes to the margins, or deems expendable in order to sustain the systems we take for granted: kangaroos tangled in fences, coral reefs beaching in silence, roadkill scattered across highways, sweatshop workers stitched into exhaustion, deaths in custody, collateral damage, people labeled as terrorists or abandoned in scuttled refugee boats, those wrestling with their identities, trapped in abusive relationships, or struggling against addiction and homelessness. These are the lives that the world quietly forgets, whose deaths feel already written, and like the slow movements of mountains or sand dunes, this systemic violence often escapes the naked eye. In this sense, Tera Echo feels like it acknowledges more than the lives already lost, reaching towards those whose deaths are still to come, its works forming the sinews of a ghost from a post-apocalyptic future that haunts the present.
Unwilling to further steep in my melancholic thoughts, I stand, but the seat slips against the polished floor and something underneath topples over with a soft, brittle crack. I step back, pretending it didn’t happen, glancing over my shoulder to see if the attendant around the corner has noticed. As my eyes adjust to the darkness I notice a branch stripped of its bark, shaped like a snake, and clearly out of place. Embarrassed, I exhale an expletive under my breath as I drop to one knee, fumbling to put the sculpture back into place, unsure of where it belonged. I quietly mumble, 'I’m sorry little snake, I didn’t see you in the dark.' Breathing with small defeat, I leave the snake in the shadows where the next visitor will likely miss it, then move towards the other works. This experience evokes how the stages of grief, from denial to acceptance, often unfold in solitude — like fumbling with your heart in the dark, alone, trying to set it back into place. But how can we grieve, in isolating silence, the victims of systemic violence?
Grief is often framed as an individual task and something to be overcome, obscuring how many cultures experience mourning as a collective journey. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, it’s called ‘Sorry Business;’ for Māori, ‘Tangihanga’; and in the Orthodox church, the soul wanders the earth for forty days before it departs. Each of these practices is distinct, yet they all bring people together: to pray, to grieve, to remember. Through this lens, Tera Echo presents works that dwell in the silence of forgotten lives and ungrievable futures, asking us to not only resist averting our gaze but to linger in the dark. To be with them in this post-apocalyptic present, breathing alongside them, like sitting next to a grieving friend, where simply being there is itself an act of care. Daisy shows us that through art, grief can be shared, held, and witnessed, forming a collective journey we can all embrace.
When faced with difficult issues we tend to retreat into critique, a reading that favours suspicion over faith, thought over touch, and loathing over love. Yet, feminist scholar Eve Sedgwick reminds us that repair begins elsewhere: in pleasure, in play, in the tender work of mending a fractured self.[1] Perhaps this is what Daisy channels when they tell us that these pieces were shaped 'according to specific rites and rituals of reclamation, ecosocial belonging, and geo-cultural transformation.' The loops in the paintings evoke prison fences, yet their circling, unbroken lines also resemble the meditative gestures used in art therapy. The drum’s dull, heavy thuds resonate with the gunshots that thunder across paddocks, while also holding the long, springing bounce of a kangaroo’s hop and a heartbeat that refuses to die out. And the earth pressed into these works, dug up by Daisy’s own hands, embodies its own histories, sediments layered with stories of time immemorial. To over-intellectualise or over-criticise art risks missing the importance of repair and the practice of survival.
Tera Echo feels like a remembering, like someone running their fingers over an old wound to remind themselves they’ve survived. It’s numb, electric, and tender all at once.
[1] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press, Durham, 2003, p. 128.
[2] Daisy Dale Collier, 'Tera Echo,' Blak Dot Gallery, https://blakdot.com.au/current-exhibitions/2025/7/12/teraecho, accessed September 2025
This article was commissioned as part of the KINGS x un Projects Emerging Writers Program, and edited by Emily Kostos. Supported by City of Melbourne, Creative Victoria and Creative Australia.