Recipient of the CIAF x Blaklash Resonance commission, Sam Harrison presents Kin’o’centrism at Cairns Art Gallery’s Court House Building. This exhibition proposes a relational cosmological model grounded in non-linear time and cyclical understandings of existence. For Harrison, place is where these temporal cycles converge to produce the present moment.

At the core of the exhibition is the Eclipse Series, a suite of lightbox works that articulate cyclical time as a process of continual renewal. Here, return is not framed as reversal, but as transformation—an evolving re-emergence shaped by change. The series connects scenes of everyday cultural life to these broader cosmological cycles, grounding expansive philosophical ideas within lived experience. One work, for example, draws on the fish traps described in Bruce Pascoe’s seminal text Dark Emu 2014, highlighting their design to allow the passage of fish both upstream and downstream—ensuring equitable access to resources across communities. In this way, cycles are not only celestial or abstract, but embedded in systems of care, sustainability, and relational responsibility.

Drawing on First Nations knowledge systems, Harrison positions darkness not as absence or void, but as a generative and inhabited space. The intervals between stars, the shadowed contours of the night sky, and the pauses within celestial cycles become sites of presence, where knowledge is held and transmitted. Figures such as Wambuwany (Crow) and Bahloo (Moon) guide this framework, emphasising that understanding is not derived solely from what is visible, but from attunement to rhythm, absence, and relationality.

Within this worldview, knowledge is embedded in what is withheld, concealed, or yet to emerge. These structures communicate ethical responsibility, articulate Lore, and reflect a cosmological system shaped by consequence, reciprocity, and conditional truths. Through Kin’o’centrism, absence becomes a promise of presence, and darkness operates as a vital medium for the transmission of knowledge, law, and cultural continuity. The eclipse emerges as a potent metaphor for a ‘new dawn’—not a linear progression, but a cyclical return, signalling the enduring and adaptive resurgence of First Nations knowledge systems.

Resonance Major Art Commissioning Project is a collaborative initiative delivered in partnership between Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) and Blaklash, presented by Cairns Art Gallery and supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.