TAHLIA UNDARLEGT
SAME TODAY AS YESTERDAY, HOPEFULLY NOT TOMORROW
Backwoods Gallery, Collingwood 10 October – 26 October 2025
Byron Bowman Kehoe
Director, Backwoods Gallery
October 2025
At the heart of Tahlia Undarlegt’s practice lies an ancient pulse, the steady, grounding rhythm of clay as it yields to the hand. Undarlegt’s exhibition "Same Today as Yesterday, Hopefully Not Tomorrow" gathers a series of sculptural statues and ornamental chains that appear both primordial and futuristic, as though unearthed from an archaeological site belonging to a civilisation not yet known. These are works that resist a single moment in time; they seem to emerge from a deep, collective memory, gesturing to a period when humanity existed as one undivided species, before borders, hierarchy and language created separation and difference was named.
The title, at once resigned and hopeful, frames the exhibition as a proposition to ponder both continuity and change. “I felt it was a light way of alluding to the collective hopelessness a lot of people feel in the world right now,” Undarlegt reflects. “But the fact that so many of us feel this way and demand change makes me hopeful for the future.” The phrase “hopefully not tomorrow” becomes a hinge, balancing between the inertia of history and the possibility of renewal. It is an appeal for transformation, a recognition that growth depends on remembering what was lost.
Undarlegt’s exploration of connection, to self, to ancestry, to humanity as a whole, began with a personal search. Her grandmother, who was part of the Stolen Generation, carried fragments of cultural memory that surfaced quietly through sharing stories. “When I was little, I thought this was just a normal way of growing up,” she recalls. “It wasn’t until later that I understood how much she had been through.” In retracing her grandmother’s story, travelling to Western Australia’s goldfields and reconnecting with language groups such as Cundeelee Wangka, Undarlegt found the initial thread that would grow into this body of work: the idea that beneath the violence of historical, cultural, and psychological separation, there persists a deep undercurrent of shared humanity.
That undercurrent takes form in the objects that make up this body of work. Sculptures bearing human features merge with architectural structures, doorways, ledges, and hollowed openings that might be portals, windows or doorways between time and place. They resemble artefacts excavated from an era beyond recorded history, their surfaces marked by touch, pressure, and human imprints. In these works, Undarlegt evokes what she describes as “things that look not of this time, from some ancient culture before us.” But these are not nostalgic reconstructions of a lost civilisation; rather, they are speculative relics of a time before division, reminders of our collective origin rendered in the most elemental of materials.
Clay, in Undarlegt’s hands, is more than medium; it is memory. It connects human making to the earth itself, recalling the first gestures of art and record: handprints on cave walls, vessels shaped for holding water, tablets used to mark the first scripts. “The handprint is the perfect work,” she says. “It transcends culturally, globally, and brings us back to the first conscious thought of creativity.” Each mark in her ceramic surfaces holds that lineage of touch, the act of creativity, forming objects and mark-making as a form of remembering. The works seem to hum with the residue of countless hands, as if each fingerprint reaches both backwards and forward through time.
The recurring motif of the chain further deepens this reflection on connection. Traditionally, an emblem of bondage or control, Undarlegt reclaims the form as a symbol of strength and interdependence. Her ceramic chains are paradoxical objects, delicate, brittle, and yet visually heavy. Each link carries the tension between separation and unity, between holding and release. “It’s always seen as this dark heavy element with a dark meaning,” she notes, “but really it’s about fragility and connection.” In this way, the chain becomes an instrument of empathy, binding together the broken fragments of human experience.
Language also threads through the exhibition as a quiet act of recovery. Several works bear titles drawn from Cundeelee Wangka: Wati (man), Tjuma (story), Kaparli (grandmother). Others use English phrases such as Hate Will Break Us Down or What Holds Us Together. Collectively, they form a dialogue between worlds, the personal and the collective, the known and the forgotten tongue. The inclusion of Indigenous words acknowledges the artist’s ongoing process of learning and reconnecting, while their pairing with universal English phrases widens the field of resonance. They remind us that language both divides and unites; it is the tool that separates us into tribes, yet also the medium through which we might understand one another again.
In this sense, Undarlegt’s architectural motifs, doorways, windows, and thresholds take on an almost mythic charge. They echo ancient stories like the Tower of Babel, which explains the origin of linguistic division. Yet here, rather than representing collapse or punishment, the openings in her sculptures suggest possibility: one door closes, another opens; the path divides but may one day converge. The architectural elements offer both containment and passage, metaphors for the human condition itself.
Formally, the works oscillate between figure and structure, body and monument. They are “part human, part architecture,” as the artist puts it, their ambiguous features inviting projection. Viewers encounter themselves in the contours, a nose, a ledge, a void. Undarlegt’s decision to keep interpretation open is deliberate: “My hands make it, but I want the viewer to see themselves or their story in it.” The sculptures become mirrors of consciousness, holding space for multiple histories and identities to coexist.
The colour palette, black, white, and natural earth tones, grounds the works in material honesty. Undarlegt allows the clay body to determine its own tone, responding intuitively to its texture and mood. The restrained palette recalls both fired ash and unglazed stone, evoking the long temporal cycles of erosion and sedimentation. It is a visual language of endurance, where contrast becomes symbolic of duality: life and death, unity and division, past and future.
Historically, clay has occupied a liminal position between art and craft, often associated with domestic or “feminine” labour. Undarlegt acknowledges this lineage but refuses its diminishment. “I think ‘craft’ was always a way to dumb down and take the skill and recognition of artwork,” she says. Yet she also celebrates the freedom within this space, an openness to experiment beyond institutional confines. Her practice thus joins a contemporary generation of artists reclaiming the language of craft as a means of radical expression where intimacy, tactility and intuition are valued as deeply intellectual art forms.
In Same Today as Yesterday, Hopefully Not Tomorrow, Undarlegt channels the sacred and the everyday, the personal and the universal. Her sculptures do not present answers so much as they create a terrain for reflection, a space to remember our shared origin and to imagine futures not yet written. The exhibition asks what it means to belong to one another again, to recognise connection not as an abstract moral value but as a fundamental truth embedded in the core of our being.
When asked what she hopes people feel after encountering her work, Undarlegt’s answer is simple: “I hope they find something within themselves… that feeling of connection but not really knowing why.” This ineffable recognition, a stirring from deep in the soul, is precisely what her work intends. It reminds us that art’s most profound power lies not in explanation but in resonance, in awakening what has always been there but floats in and out of conscious recognition.
In these vessels, chains, and fragments, the artist gathers the scattered remnants of human experience and shapes them anew. They speak of pain and resilience, of histories fractured and rejoined. They whisper that perhaps, in remembering where we came from, in tracing the handprints left upon the earth, we might again learn how to be one people.