At age 12, in the late 1990s, James Tylor learned to carve. His stepfather, a Barkindji man, taught him to make clubs and spears at the old Menindee government mission in far western New South Wales, long since handed back to Indigenous people once forced to live there. But their relationship was fraught: besides imparting cultural knowhow when camping, hunting and fishing together, he says his stepdad could be violent.

Tylor, born in Mildura in 1986, was living on the Barka-Darling River with his mother Christine, a proud anti-war, environmental and Indigenous rights activist of Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna) descent, whose traditional lands include the Adelaide plains. In recent decades, Kaurna language is being reawakened after colonisation’s decimation. The connection between language and cultural knowledge—and the gaps in the historical records—would centre Tylor’s later artmaking, using artisanal photographic processes and traditional tool making.

Tylor’s late father, Peter, was of Māori (Te Arawa) lineage, and there are also English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch and Norwegian forebears across his family tree. Tylor moved from Menindee with his mother to Derby in the West Australian Kimberley, spending most of his teenage years in a melting pot of cultures, although his best mates were the Nunga kids from South Australia, who shared a secret tongue: “We would speak in Nunga language with each other so other kids didn’t know what we were saying.”

While Tylor had grown up learning Barkindji, learning Nunga was key given Kaurna comes from the same language family. He has since done language courses and read the Kaurna dictionary. “It’s a revived language, so there are still only five fluent speakers,” he tells Art Guide Australia from Canberra, where he is co-parenting his young son, whom he gave a Kaurna middle name. Grappling with the language’s conjugations and prepositions remains tough, although his email signature is peppered with positive Kaurna phrases such as Niina marni (Hello, are you good) and the informal paitya! (‘great, thanks’, or ‘deadly’).

At school in Derby, Tylor began to learn photography, a step directly influencing his later ambition to become a photographer. But first, he trained and worked as a carpenter, between 2003 and 2008, first in Australia, then in Denmark because his then partner was Danish. “I decided to do something more meaningful,” he recalls. It was the time of the Iraq war, and he toyed with an unrealised ambition to become a photojournalist of Middle East conflicts. “In the end, I decided there were more issues here in Australia I’d rather be engaged with.”

In Adelaide, he gained a bachelor of arts (photography) in 2011 and a masters in visual arts and design in 2013—with an honours in fine arts (photography) in Tasmania in between. During his undergraduate phase, he had the opportunity to learn the painstaking old photo graphic processes of daguerreotype, which involves using an antiquated, accordion-like bellows camera, and delicate silver plates, as well as hand tinting. These 19th-century processes seemed an ideal way to capture the seen and unseen in the Australian story.

Tylor’s 10-year touring retrospective is called Turrangka… in the Shadows, curated by Leigh Robb. He is perhaps best known for his 2013 series From an untouched landscape, including his carefully arranged black-and-white photographs of landscapes on his Country, into which large round and rectangular holes have been cut to reveal an “absolute black shadow” of velvet backing. These symbolise gaps in the historical record, the result of the systemic removal of Indigenous people from Country, including children being stolen and placed on missions, forced to lose their language and converted to Christianity. The photographs are interspersed with his Kaurna objects, mostly in painted wood, some in stone.

Tylor’s lineage is complex. His maternal great-great grandmother, for instance, was a domestic servant to a white family whose own daughter was then adopted into that family. “My great grandmother was related to the family because of someone in the family having sex with a servant [his great-great grandmother]. So, I’m related both to that family as well as the Aboriginal servant.”

How does he reconcile that history? “It’s so far back now, I don’t even really think about it. Servitude is not a very nice practice, but it’s the backbone of South Australia, really.” Does he think of the servitude as slavery? “Of course. The UN says it’s slavery.”

Tylor, who turns 40 next year, says his past decade’s work “feels rounded and complete”. He will likely continue with photography a few more years, then try something different, but is unsure what that will comprise. “I’m open to anything,” he says.

Turrangka… in The Shadows
James Tylor
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (Mornington Peninsula/Bunurong Country)

29 March—25 May
John Curtin Gallery (Perth/Boorloo)
3 July—14 September

This article was originally published in the March/April 2025 print edition of Art Guide Australia.