Dennis Golding

Dennis Golding (b. 1989) is an artist descended from the Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay people of north west New South Wales. Born and raised in Sydney, Golding spent his youth growing up on Everleigh Street in the suburb of Redfern – the eastern border to an Aboriginal-managed social housing district known as ‘The Block’. Golding’s childhood experiences and memories inform his photography, installation and mixed-media practice, as he explores not only his personal history but also a shared sense of cultural identity.

Casting Shadows (chandelier) (2022) - an installation of sculptures in the shape of chandelier and ceramic shield – captures the political and social history of The Block. Following years of Aboriginal-led protests and campaigning, The Block was formally established in 1973 to provide affordable low-cost living for Aboriginal people in inner city Sydney. Since then, the suburb of Redfern has been the site of some of Australia’s most significant civil rights movements. The Aboriginal Medical Service, Aboriginal Legal Service and Aboriginal Housing Company were established in Redfern in the 1970s, and the tent embassy in Canberra grew from a Redfern-based group of activists.[1]

The Victorian-era architecture of Everleigh Street is the focus of Cast in cast out. Golding grew up living and playing across five different terrace houses on the street – the back fences were knocked down, allowing families to move freely between one another’s homes.[2] Using epoxy resin and iron oxides, the artist recast the ornate iron lacework adorning the balconies and palisades of these terraces. The mid-nineteenth century architectural feature, with its curlicues of European flora such as ivy and daylilies, depicts an imported design aesthetic as part of the colonial expansion of Sydney. The decorative feature once marked boundaries and asserted ownership over land and space, and is a material reminder of Aboriginal dispossession. By recasting these features as sculptural objects, however, Golding has transformed the iron lacework into a collection of fragments, like slices of memory and time. They now conjure stories of Golding’s own family, as well as generations of other Aboriginal families, who lived with and were surrounded by this same architecture every day. “I’m trying to decolonise these objects in a way that I become in control of the object, rather than the object being in control of me.”[3]

[1] Fiona Kelly McGregor,“The Future is Here”, Carriageworks, 3-28 November 2021. [2] Sebastian Goldspink, Free/State, Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2022, 100. [3] Dennis Golding, “Spotlight | 2020 NSW VAEF Recipient Dennis Golding,” Artspace, 2 December 2020,

Over the years, and more recently as Redfern has been increasingly gentrified, Aboriginal communities living in The Block have been subject to the authority of the state. Golding recalls a shared childhood experience of “police constantly surveilling us and riding around on horseback… [as kids] we wanted, in some ways, to be invisible and hide even though we didn’t do anything wrong.”[1] Golding has redressed these collective memories in his artistic explorations of the superhero archetype. The power of invisibility, and equally visibility, is played out in his photographic self-portrait Untitled (South Headland, Botany Bay) (2021) and collaborative cape-making workshops, where costuming and the aesthetic of the superhero are tools for identification and liberation. Even the self-portrait of Cast in cast out draws on a similar sentiment; “I’ve reimagined the cast iron material as a shield.”[2] For Golding, the superhero archetype brings “stronger and more empowering representations of contemporary Aboriginal culture within urban spaces… when you put on a costume, you feel a sense of transformation.”[3]

[4] Dennis Golding quoted by Fiona Kelly McGregor, “The Future is Here,” and Andrew Stephens, “Dennis Golding’s superhero cape,” Art Guide Australia, November/December, 2021, i134, 70. [5] Dennis Golding, “Spotlight | 2020 NSW VAEF Recipient Dennis Golding.” [6] Dennis Golding quoted by Fiona Kelly McGregor.