Philly Kemarre (b.1996) , an Arrernte artist and computer scientist, descends from Rainmakers of Urlpmerre Country, keepers of healing songs. He works at the intersection of ancestral Lore, memory and symbolic systems. His practice fuses ceremony with computation, treating art as ontological recall… a method to restore the relational architecture of Country, being and time.
Philly rejects the binary between traditional and contemporary. He paints reality, the Dreaming, the way he lives and experiences it… as a recursive metaphysical field, a structuring force that shapes events, memory and identity across spacetime, unbound by the past and essential to presence.
His canvases are not mere depictions, but recursive memory-maps. They are field equations, songlines in pigment, that encode the co-presence of spirit, signal and story. His work functions as a relational interface, revealing the non-linear continuity between human interactions, ancestral Lore and the physical environment.
Drawing on his expertise in computing and lived-experience as an Indigenous Australian, Philly views memory as a dynamic field, not a static archive. His practice examines how kinship structures, emotional recursion and symbolic density underpin epistemic integrity and how colonial disruption fractures this logic at a systemic level.
Through his practice, Philly constructs a model of distributed, sovereign consciousness, tethered to obligation and accountability. His work poses critical questions: ‘What does it mean to remember responsibly? How can Lore be encoded without extraction?’
Philly’s practice is not an aesthetic gesture, but an ancient philosophical system rooted in ceremony, not theory; grounded in Lore, not abstraction.
