Becoming Sweat

Artefacts in Action

This project began with a question I explored during an ArtsNT Fellowship: How do we create rituals that honour local seasonality and histories? I was drawn to the build-up — that sticky, anticipatory stretch before the rains — and curious about how it might be marked, held, or celebrated. I started by cooking. By paying attention to what the body needed. By noticing shifts in mood, weather, appetite, and energy.

What began as a solo research process quickly became relational. The work started calling in others. The Sweat Collective formed through this unfolding — a group of artists, cooks, thinkers, and friends I deeply admire. We came together not just to reflect on my research, but to co-create something that stretched across disciplines and sensibilities. It was a way to build connection and experiment with new forms — to create insight, offer reflection, and, hopefully, make some shit-hot cool new things happen.

As I explored these questions, I became increasingly aware that seasonality is not just meteorological — it is cultural, embodied, and deeply grounded in Larrakia knowledge systems. As part of this exhibition, I’ve included the Larrakia seasonal calendar, which offers a rich and cyclical understanding of local seasons — far beyond the binary of “wet” and “dry.” The calendar invites a different kind of attention: one that is responsive to subtle shifts in plant, animal, and weather patterns, and that reflects the deep time knowledge of Larrakia people. It has shaped how I think about rhythm, timing, and what it means to make and be with others in tune with place.

During one Sweat Dinner, we invited a curator from the Museum and Archives of the Northern Territory to speak. She spoke about the shift in archiving — the move toward collecting what’s not normally collected, what resists the archive. Bark paintings, she said, had long been collected and stored.

But Uncle Tony Lee offered a gentle provocation:

“We always knew the bark painting would decay. We knew it couldn’t live forever. What I want to know is — how are we keeping the movement, the knowledge, the making of the bark painting alive?”

This exhibition doesn’t claim to answer that. But it leans toward that question. How do we keep alive the skills, knowings, relationships, and seasonal intelligences that don’t sit easily on a plinth or in a box?

Maybe by sweating a little. Maybe by sitting with what lingers.

Artefacts as Slithers of Memory

This exhibition doesn’t hold a complete record. It offers fragments — slithers of memory — glimpses into moments shaped by sweat, seasonality, and shared time. Some are drawn from Darwin’s public past: urban celebrations where people gathered to move, eat, dance, and be together in the heat. Others are from the more recent present of the Sweat Collective — a coming-together of artists and ideas, where the making was as important as what was made.

This exhibition weaves together material from different timelines: archival photographs from Darwin’s public celebrations in the 1980s and 1990s, and contemporary documentation from the Sweat Collective’s recent gatherings. By placing these side by side, we invite you to notice the echoes — how past and present rituals of gathering, sweating, and celebrating seasonality shape and inform each other — or not.

Together, these artefacts form an assemblage of relational practice — not about fixed outcomes, but about shared gestures, shifting contexts, and the feelings that linger long after the moment has passed. They are offerings, not explanations. Not archives in the traditional sense, but traces of what it means to be with one another through seasonality, food, weather, and care.

This online exhibition brings together a curated selection of short films, photographs, written reflections, email excerpts, and moments of shared provocation — digital traces of a practice that is often messy, embodied, and hard to pin down.

And then, there are the things that can’t be shown here. The missed calls, the belly laughs, the sweat trickling down your back, the feeling of not knowing what comes next. These live in the gaps — in what resists the archive. Hospitality, attunement, generosity: these are hard to pin down, but they are everywhere in this work.

Blurring the Public, Private, and Social

In this exhibition, the lines between public, private, and social begin to blur — much like they do in the build-up. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s distinctions, we can understand the private realm as the space of the body, the home, the kitchen — where necessity and intimacy reside. The public realm, by contrast, is where action appears, where we make ourselves visible to one another in plurality. And then there is the social, which Arendt regarded with some suspicion — the space where individual distinctiveness can be flattened into conformity.

Sweat Season and the work of the Sweat Collective unsettle these boundaries. Acts of cooking, gathering, writing, or sweating together — often grounded in personal or domestic settings — spill outward, becoming public through shared presence, reflection, and documentation. The collective’s gestures are not staged performances but lived entanglements that resist easy categorisation. Rather than collapsing into the social, this work insists on a public that honours the deeply personal, and a private that is shaped by weather, history, and relationship.

Here, the artefacts are not just records — they are traces of action, intimacy, and shared becoming.

A Methodology in Motion

The Sweat Collective itself is an entangled collaboration: it can’t be held in a single object or moment. It exists in our relationships — with each other, with the season, and with the things we make together.

What underpins this work is not a fixed method, but a practice we’ve come to call theory in motion — a way of making, thinking, and being that is shaped by moods, context, and relationship. You really do have to be in it to feel it. But this exhibition hopes to offer something close: a scent, a shimmer, a flash of something familiar. Like leafing through a family photo album you didn’t know you were part of.

As you scroll, we invite you to move slowly, return often, and approach each artefact as part of an unfolding process — not a conclusion.