etching on paper, cardboard, copper, wood

Commissioned by the National Art School with the proud support of the NSW Government through the Blockbusters Funding initiative.

Made with the assistance of Carolyn Mckenzie-Craig, Janet Parker-Smith, and Rebecca O’Shea.

Bingo is a seven-metre installation by Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay artist Dennis Golding produced in collaboration with the National Art School’s printmaking department. Each etched card is the size of a brick, laid end to end like a wall, recalling the red-terracotta terraces of Redfern, a vital site of Aboriginal community and resistance, where Golding was raised.

Drawn from the artist’s recollections of bingo nights hosted by his Nan and Aunty in an abandoned house on Eveleigh Street, the work remembers how they stitched together joy from what little they had, cutting cards from cardboard, running power through borrowed cords, making space where there was none.

Etched into the cards are everyday things: cats curled on sun-warmed steps, the long coil of a corded phone, letters opened slowly, a cup of tea cooling by the sink, the quiet rattle of fishing gear. Each one a kind of key. A madeleine of memory, simple, ordinary, and luminous in its return.

Earthy tones recall the walls of his childhood and the ochres of Aboriginal art, while blue and red ink, reminiscent of biro, echoes the everyday. Some surfaces bear the dust of actual dirt, pressed gently into the paper, a residue of place.

The installation includes the metal plates used to print each image, along with hand-carved wooden number chips. They sit as quiet witnesses to process, care, and craft, echoes of making do, of making meaning. “It wasn’t about winning,” Golding says, “but the feeling of freedom and connection.”

Bingo offers no easy nostalgia. Instead, it speaks of strength formed in closeness, of laughter shared across tables, of walls that held community, not confinement. It is a tender monument to survival, made from the small, enduring things that hold us.

written by Micheal Do