A Melody, A Song: Zaachariaha Fielding
The joyous work of multidisciplinary artist and musician Zaachariaha Fielding knows no boundaries, forging links between past, present and a collective, queer future.
Image credit: Zaachariaha Fielding, 25-21AS, 2021, acrylic on linen, 198 x 152 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane and APY Art Centre Collective
Back in March of 2020 I was dancing with friends at the iconic Club Kooky – a collective queer institution that has held parties on Gadigal land in so-called Sydney for much of the past 20 years. In that brief pocket between the anguish and grief of the 2019 bushfire season and the rapid-onset anxiety of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was hope. There was – briefly – the brightest joy.
On that harmonious, intergenerational dance floor – under billowing canopies of handmade decorations, bodies pressed together, moving in murmuration – a familiar voice sails out through the speakers over many hands-in-the-air. It is the heartfelt vocals of Zaachariaha Fielding, of duo Electric Fields, and it stirs the collective into an anthemic, cathartic singalong. Tears snake freely across smiles onto the shoulders of friends and lovers.
Zaachariaha Fielding is an emerging multidisciplinary visual artist from desert country in Eastern Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY Lands). While avoiding what can feel like the trappings of language around contemporary queer identity, he embodies a Blak, feminine ferocity and fragility entirely his own – and it is liberating to behold. Zaachariaha derives much of his power and grace from personal, cultivated connections with lineages of Aṉangu artists working across mediums (including song, dance, painting and sculpture) who continue to honour the visual language of their land and culture in the now.
As a singer with Electric Fields, Zaachariaha has hit many milestones. Alongside the platonic and creative love-of-his-life Michael Ross, his band has toured nationally and internationally, performing in the Sydney Opera House’s Forecourt, releasing critically acclaimed ...Subscribe to read this article in full
