In 2005, the then director of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art in Darwin (previously named 24HR Art), Steve Eland, came up with a somewhat radical scheme. When it came to government funding, the times were dominated by a trend towards Second Life, a concentration on virtual worlds and online-based art activity. Eland proposed the opposite—First Life: taking artists in real time to locales they would otherwise not experience and allowing them to respond as they saw fit.
The project began ten years ago with an artists’ journey to Arnhem Land, titled First Life Residency Project in Landscape. It has since involved artists from around Australia, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and China.
The potentials of physical interaction between artists from different cultures and different geographical locales has proven to be a rich, albeit unwieldy, one. After a number of varying projects, in 2011 the mission encompassed First Life Residency Project in Landscape which brought together contemporary visual artists from Australia—Sam Leach, Tony Lloyd, Ben Armstrong—and China—Cang Xin, Shi Jinsong and Wu Daxin—to experience the landscapes and cultures of Northern Australia and regional China.
Designed to be an intensive ‘real life’ cultural and creative exchange, the project involved travelling by road through the landscapes of Northern Australia and visiting remote regions and Indigenous communities in Arnhem Land and the Kimberley; and undertaking a hazardous road trip through the south-western provinces of China, from Lanzhou to Lhasa.
While it was always planned to be an adventure, there was no way to anticipate the strange, hovering sense of mortality that followed the group, from encountering a Lorrkon—a traditional Aboriginal hollow-log grave in the bush—to witnessing a Tibetan Sky Burial. Of the eight