A Breath Before Dawn

A Breath Before Dawn is a meditation on memory, inheritance and the unresolved presence of history within the body. Drawing on his Worimi identity and his family's history in the First World War, Dean Cross reflects on what is carried across generations, what is remembered, what is inherited and what remains unspoken or unknowable. The exhibition resists fixed narratives of commemoration and instead holds space for ambiguity and emotional complexity. Central to the exhibition is In Living Memory, a two-channel moving image work in which Cross performs an improvised dance on Walbunja Country while dressed in military uniform. The work carries an understated emotional intensity: moving through the landscape with deliberate vulnerability, Cross transforms the uniform from a symbol of discipline and colonial authority into something intimate and unstable. Accompanying In Living Memory is Of Stone and Blood, a photographic series created concurrently with the moving image work. These images capture moments of stillness and reflection, extending the emotional register of the performance and preserving its lingering trace as a quiet act of witnessing.