Jazz Money: Lightning for a song

The Commercial is delighted to present Lightning for a song, Jazz Money’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition sees the poet write in the gallery, placing poems and songs of love and protest within the large volume. Walls become pages bearing micro poems composed from spotted gum letters that she has burnt and left-aligned. A photographic diptych reproduces on light-reflective aluminium panels the earliest aerial documentation of Marrambidya (the Murrumbidgee River on Wiradjuri Country) undertaken by the New South Wales Government in the early 1960s. Country is animated by the sinuous Bila and cut through with song. Marrambidya has become one of the defining presences in Money’s work. Throughout her poetry, performance and installation practice, the Bila has functioned as a living archive of language, memory and continuity.

Australia’s fire-adapted sclerophyll forests are ecosystems in which regeneration depends upon burning. Cultural burning is an act of custodianship, renewal and care for Country. Fire is generative.

Fire is destruction. Book burnings, long associated with authoritarianism, continue within our political moment. Lightning for a song is presented in the wake of the 2026 decision by University of Queensland Press to destroy, for reasons unrelated to the artist, 5,000 copies of Bila, a children’s book adaptation of Money’s celebrated poem Bila: A River Cycle.

Neon embers on the gallery floor reclaim agency.