Visual Art
Growing up, Elijah was often found drawing or being otherwise creative. When inviting friends over as a child, he would insist that they should play by colouring or making something rather than run around outside.
Elijah’s visual arts practice is broad; ranging from coloured pencil, graphite, ink, mural artworks, silver and goldsmithing, videography, digital artwork, photography, textile, multimedia, painting (acrylic, gouache, oil, watercolour), printmaking + more. His work has reoccurring themes of cheekiness as a reminder to the viewer that it is essential for queer mob to have their joy recentred and move away from the flood of trauma that tends to be overrepresented.
Contents:
Pearlescent Viscous
Digital collage printed on georgette fabric
4200mm x 180mm
Previously shown:
2022
Group Show A Rainbow of Tomorrows
Narrm (Melbourne)
(Koorie Heritage Trust X Deadly Fringe X City of Melbourne)
2023
Group Show The Body is More than This
Narrm (Melbourne)
(Immigration Museum X Midsumma)
2023
Group Show Holding Pattern
Wollerwerli (New Norfolk, Tasmania)
(haus of vovo)
2025
Group Show Taking Up Space: Insatiable
Narrm (Melbourne)
(Meat Market)
Our queer Blak futures are outside of colonial conceptions of gender and sexuality. Autonomously, we have reclaimed the sordid fetishisation over our bodies, away from the settler colonial gaze and shifted into an era of self adoration. We contain multitudes, we are multifaceted, we are ever evolving and expanding. For our futures, we are post shame, post Western ideologies of beauty, we are post egocentric capitalistic surveyors weaponising pink-dollar clout-chasing billionaires. We are post self and remain pro community. Wreaking havoc and joy, we are relishing in our bodies and the sensations they share with us, we are indulging in the varying forms of viscosity that we seek. We are present, we are past and we are future.
Creature of the Blak Lagoon
Elijah Money & Pierra Van Sparkes
2024
Multi-media installation
Sawtooth Gallery ARI
Kunermurlukeher (Launceston, Tasmania)
HAVE YOU SEEN HIM?
Some call him the Creature from the Blak Lagoon, some call him magna foraminis, but you can call him tonight if you’re sick and tired of settler stunts and coloniser dawgs.
Wandering and weaving his way around waterholes, the Creature’s nomenclature is derived from his presumed natural habitat, though some experts believe he comes from some bigger, Blaker hole, deep within.
Emerging from fluids, legend suggests even minor bodies of liquid can open the threshold between his world and our own. Stay vigilant: a pint of beer, white tears, or the sweaty upper lip of your cousin’s gammin new boyfriend are potential portals to peril.
Enigmatic by nature, the Creature has long evaded society’s gaze, rarely revealing himself even in moments of feeding frenzy.
The Creature from the Blak Lagoon is HUNGRY. He won’t be satiated by recognition or reconciliation, he is fuelled by rage, revenge, and the other other white meat. Upon satisfaction, his sharp, sweet tooth sips and slurps a juicy watermelon cruiser to round the palate.
The following archive presents our collective findings over years of hunting and gathering evidence from numerous sources of mid to absent acclaim. Today, we open our hearts and holes to the public asking if, you too, have seen or summoned the Creature?
If you have any information please call 1800 ALIWA
Together, with the Creature in our corner, we can end the caucasity.
gurrudhaany birranydyang (goanna boy)
Solo Exhibition
2022
Multi-media installation
Sawtooth Gallery ARI
Kunermurlukeher (Launceston, Tasmania)
gurudhaany birranydyang, a space where Elijah Money speaks to Wiradjuri totem animal, the goanna. Made up of a written triptych, oil gauche painting, acrylic artwork and video piece, gurudhaany birranydyang highlights the relationship between culture and the colony through body and self. Incorporating camp elements, Money averts the settler colonial gaze and re-centres queer Blak joy.
Presenting the journey of gurudhaany; whose fate was doomed to be captured by the colony, the goanna escapes to freedom. Using resin to trap the goanna, Money critiques settler colonial capitalism and how the industrial revolution continues to impact Country through its obsession with plastic. Gurudhaany’s capture speaks symbolically of how settler colonialism has an ongoing desire to only view First Peoples as stagnant and unable to evolve. Money refutes this ideology, speaking to anti colonial autonomy.
Namesake
2022
Sterling silver, 9ct gold.
L 1000mm x H 25mm x W 6mm
Group show Layers of Blak
Koorie Heritage Trust
Toured 2023-2025 (Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, The Jam Factory, Seppeltsfield South Australia, Tarnanthi Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Gippsland Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery).
Created as part of the Blak Design program (Koorie Heritage Trust X NGV X RMIT).
Our names are bestowed to us as gifts and as a way to share our identity. Through “Namesake” I wanted to pay homage to my lineage of last names, starting with my Wiradjuri last name ‘Williams’. The only tile that contains two words ‘make me’ is a play on words of my biological fathers last name. My legal last name, ‘Money’, is my mothers maiden name; a name that I legally chose to take on at 19 to share not only my love for my mother, but to feel connected with my sister as well.
Leaning into the strength of communicating, it felt fitting to create a 25 word poem that encapsulates the short and vulnerable entirety of my 25 years of existence.
This piece doesn’t contain a clasp as it doesn’t end— my presence and story do not end here; I am doing my best to continue evolving, growing, learning and nurturing both myself and others. My identity contains multitudes and I am multifaceted like that of a precious gem.
Predominantly made by carving my hand writing into wax with the addition of stamping certain words to add emphasis, this piece is made from recycled sterling silver and uses yellow 9ct gold to highlight points of connection.
Placid in Play
Caleb Thaiday, Elijah Money & Tre Turner
Multi-media installation
Previously Shown: 2024
Narrm (Melbourne)
Incinerator Gallery
Narrm (Melbourne)
BLINDSIDE
This exhibition imagines a queer Blak Futurism that celebrates Blak bodies and Blak joy through a site of respite, reflection, and relaxation.
Artists Caleb Thaiday, Elijah Money and Stone Turner collaboratively construct an oasis-like installation that captures the essence of queer Blak sanctuaries. Through their drag personas, the artists invite audiences to step through adorned columns and reflect upon cascading larger-than-life figures surrounded by botanicals and blooms on silk banners. Manifesting as a queer temple, the space honours the ritual of gathering across this continent, paying homage to places of water, whilst counteracting the colonial gaze.
Placid in Play places a strong emphasis on the joy of Blak communities, creating spaces where queer Mob can unite, coexist, and convalesce.
This installation recreates queer Blak oases and pays homage to places of water, presented through a Blak Queer Futurism lens. With an emphasis on Blak joy, these areas are curated to reimagine a space of how Queer Mob come together, where we co-exist and where we can rest.
Enter through the adorned columns that pose as the gate, the banners hold the opening through wavy, viscous digital designs of the Collectives Drag personas. Patrons encouraged to take time to offer an exchange to the oasis and engage in a moment of reflection.
Enjoy the warmth of being held in this oasis; this space that exists out of safety stemming from a place of Blak Queer joy. Invited into our past and our future, indulge in sweet respite in the ephemeral sanctum of the exhibition.
Ethereal figures float in and out of the space, in calm perpetual motion, cycling through different rituals of before, now and in the tomorrows.
bottlebrush.bit
2026
Acrylic on wood
400mm X 400mm
Narrm (Melbourne)
(Fortyfivedownstairs)
Group show Fledge Radiance
In celebration of NAIDOC week, curators E. Salmon and Tré Turner have asked a selection of queer Blakfulla artists based around Narrm to showcase their work.
We are coming together to celebrate each other, the gifts we give each other, the gifts we receive from our ancestors, Elders and mob, and the gifts we are yet to give.
We are inspired by the Bower bird's feathers, whose iridescent blue is created by structural colouration. It is not the individual feather, but the crystalline structure of them grouped together that shines such radiance. We are creating a bower; collecting little things we like to show off, comforts, reflections, traces of Country. And this can become a shelter from which we all fledge.
Incorporating a hand painted faux digital lens to the natural, this painting speaks to wearing those glasses that are a touch out of prescription to offer a DIY filter to the world. Money has always had a deep interest in ever evolving digital spaces, by marrying his photography practice with his adoration of native flora comes a unique intersection between the organic and the inorganic. Offering a familiar colour range of South-Eastern bush and rainforests, Money wishes to question where these lines blur between country and the cycle of technology.
Gallery of some other previous works: