Buru Ngamarna Walaja (Land of Milk and Honey)
Michael Jalaru Torres
2026
“This land holds many secrets layered beneath stories, we are always connected to country by mother’s milk, the industrial age has exploited country of its wealth that flows like honey, what is left are scarification of country that never heals, mother earth screams in silence as we adorn ourselves from her skin.”
Artist Statement
Buru Ngamarna Walaja (Land of Milk and Honey)
Country holds stories beneath every surface. Water moves through it, lives depend upon it, and memory remains within it. My relationship with Country begins with belonging—with the understanding that what sustains us also asks something of us.
*Buru Ngamarna Walaja (Land of Milk and Honey)* grows from this relationship. Through aerial photography, cyanotype, and hand-applied gold pigment, I consider what happens when the living body that nourishes us is treated as wealth to be removed, and what care we must return.
Mother’s milk is our first experience of being sustained by another. It connects nourishment with intimacy, dependence, and responsibility. In this work, milk becomes a way of speaking about our continuing relationship with Country: a connection carried through our bodies and across generations. When Country is wounded, that injury moves through the lives of those who belong to it.
Honey carries the attraction of sweetness and abundance. Within the promise of a “land of milk and honey,” I also hear the appetite of colonisation: the belief that a place and its riches are there for the taking. Nourishment becomes commodity. Taking becomes an industry. What remains is a landscape expected to keep giving.
From above, waterways, tidal movements, tracks, and excavations share the same frame. My drone photographs bring these different marks into view, allowing me to consider how movement through Country becomes movement imposed upon it. A road cuts across a surface. An excavation opens the ground. Patterns that might first appear abstract become evidence of decisions made about land and whose interests it serves.
The distance of the aerial view sits uneasily beside the intimacy of the body. I see cuts, skin, veins, and wounds. Through these associations, I ask the viewer to stay with the living place within the image and the relationships affected by its disturbance.
Sunlight exposes the photograph onto the cyanotype surface, illuminating an image of Country. The light that sustains life also makes these marks visible. Exposure becomes an act of attention: bringing the wounds into view so they can be witnessed and asking us to recognise the life surrounding them.
Water washes the print, revealing its blue depths. Digital capture meets chemistry, sunlight, and touch. The image takes shape through an exchange between materials and elements, carrying associations of saltwater, tidal shadow, and memory.
I then return to the surface by hand, carefully drawing gold pigment across the image. The gold is honey - the wealth drawn from Country. Its shimmer attracts the eye to disturbed ground, holding the beauty of the material alongside the consequences of extraction.
Drawing this honey back onto Country also expresses an obligation to give back. Each deliberate mark asks how the wealth taken from land might be returned through care: supporting the recovery of damaged places, protecting water and habitats, and sustaining the people who care for Country. The patience required to apply the pigment becomes a small, physical expression of that responsibility.
The gesture cannot undo the wound. It makes visible the attention that repair demands. Returning wealth to Country must extend beyond the image into the ways we live, the decisions we make, and the resources we commit to the land’s recovery.
I understand these connections through kincentric interexistence: our lives take shape through relationships with human and non-human kin. Those relationships carry obligations. They ask us to consider what we receive, what we take, and what we return for those who follow.
Across *Path + Flow*, *Machine + Food*, *Sun + Moon*, *Salt + Water*, and *Greed + Nothing*, these questions remain open. Each pairing asks what passes between its terms—what sustains, what interrupts, what is exhausted, and what might be restored.
Country continues to hold us. Through sunlight, water, and the careful return of gold, this work asks how we answer that care.