PAUL BONG | 'Subject 1880' | 2026 | Unique state/ hand coloured intaglio and chine collee print/ 31 plates | H 1600 x W 995 mm

Subject 1880 recalls the period when Aboriginal people across the rainforest regions of Far North Queensland were documented through colonial systems that reduced human beings to subjects, records and numbers. Families who had cared for Country over countless generations suddenly found themselves written into another people's history while their own voices were systematically erased.

In part, Subject 1880 is an attempt to reconstruct the young Lani Mulgrave Blair, to put him back together from fragments of the past and the present. As a result, Lani stands at a convergence of bloodlines, Country and memory, a chronical of inherited experience.

The reconstruction process reminds us how often Indigenous identity has been built like this, pieced together from fragments left behind after generations of cultural disruption. Lani’s presence speaks for all Yidinji people whose names have disappeared from official records but never disappeared from family.

Against the backdrop of these violences the work also speaks to the power of love. Not sentimental love, but ancestral love. The love embedded within Country itself, waiting patiently for descendants to return and remember. Lani stands as both witness and offering, mourning what was taken, honouring what endured and reminding us that even after profound violence, the deepest inheritance passed from one generation to the next was never fear. It was love. Love that transformed survival into continuity. Love as an act of resistance.

PAUL BONG | 'Subject 1880' | 2026 | Unique state/ hand coloured intaglio and chine collee print/ 31 plates | H 1600 x W 995 mm