Lamenting the flowers

Christian Thompson is a photographer, performance and conceptual artist whose largely biographical practice is infused with wit, irony and humour. The consummate performer, it is difficult to separate Thompson from his work as he explores what it means to be Indigenous today and the relationships that exist between objects, space and history. Although Thompson has worked nationally and internationally, he frequently returns to his country around Barcaldine, in southwest Queensland.

Thompson's work 'Lamenting the flowers' is drawn from the series, 'We bury our own' 2012 which was developed during the artist's research into the Australian Indigenous photographic archive in the Pitt Rivers Museum of Oxford University, during Thompson's Doctoral studies. In this series Thompson examines the possibility of a spiritual repatriation from the archive, in the absence of a physical repatriation.