Archie Moore’s late father Stanley liked to tell stories. He had a lot of them; born in 1908, Stan was 62 years old by the time Archie came along.

One recurring thread was gold, and Stanley’s conviction that land he grew up on – 2267 acres near Coolatai in northern New South Wales, that his own father had won for free in a turn-of-the-century land ballot – was sitting on a literal gold mine.

“I wish I had recorded it, listened to his stories,” Moore tells InReview. “He’d talk for an hour… I wasn’t interested, didn’t really ask about his family or anything, until much later. By that time it was too late.”

Moore was 24 years old when his father died of prostate cancer at the age of 86. Later, as Moore set out on his expansive and ongoing practice of retracing his family across generations and archives, he began to piece together the story of his father’s life – or at least, the fragments he left behind.

“Looking through his deceased estate and records I found, he’s always dodging debt collectors, going from one place to the next,” Moore says. “It made me think that maybe this was just some way to get money, to disappear again. Because he was very educated; he knew about the land, he knew about lots of things.

“There was always this hope or promise that there’d be some kind of money coming into the family, and we wouldn’t be living in a low socioeconomic situation. It never eventuated.”

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Stanley Moore might never have struck gold, but among his papers he did leave a treasure map: a hand-drawn piece of paper scrawled with soil descriptions and bore measurements that Archie discovered after his father’s death.

Whether it led to fortune or folly, a version of that map now sits in the Museum of Economic Botany at the Adelaide Botanic Garden. Made of real gold, it’s one piece of Moore’s new body of work, Remnants of My Father, presented as part of Yield Strength, the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. It is both a reconstruction, and a kind of deconstructed portrait, capturing his father’s life through the objects and obsessions he left behind.

We see the war medals Stanley always vowed to chuck in the bin in a show of pacifism; the red bucket he would keep by his bedside each night – usually full by morning in what Archie now recognises as an early symptom of prostate cancer; and clinical notes from a tumour removal that found “mineral deposits” inside the would-be prospector’s own body.

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"I made these sculptures out of gold to, in some way, realise that dream."

At its centre is a sculpture of a heart, plated in 18-carat gold.

“I made these sculptures out of gold to, in some way, realise that dream,” Moore says. “There’s a perception that my father had a ‘heart of gold’.”

Moore is perhaps the most recognisable name in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s regular survey exhibition, this year curated by Ellie Buttrose, the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art curator with whom Moore was famously awarded the Golden Lion at the 2024 Venice Biennale for his exhibition kith and kin.

Buttrose has assembled new work by 24 artists from around the country, presented across the Art Gallery’s North Terrace galleries, Samstag Museum of Art, and the Adelaide Botanic Garden.

“It talks about the amount of force that you can place on material until it breaks, or it transforms and can’t return,” Buttrose says of the engineering term that gives her biennial its title, Yield Strength.

“I think there’s a lot of artists who are experimenting, pushing their materials, breaking their materials. But of course, it’s also a metaphor for how can we, politically and emotionally and aesthetically, respond to a world that has changed, and changed irreversibly.”

Many of the works share a vivid sense of materiality and pressure, from the silicon limbs of Perth-based Nathan Beard, whose hands and fingers stretch and contort with unreal Seussian elasticity, to the black-and-crimson ceramics of Pitjantjatjara artist Josina Pumani, that echo the scorched legacy of British weapons testing at Maralinga. Or, the polished steel structures of Adelaide-based Jennifer Mathews, that funnel audiences through the gallery space like cattle. These are works that often push and pull, that resist and buckle. That have been shaped, and shape in turn.

Reflecting on his own inclusion, Moore says he initially thought appearing in a biennial led by his longtime collaborator might seem like “nepotism”.

“She said, ‘It would be weird if you weren’t’,” he says.

Set in conversation with other works – like Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingba artist D Harding’s breaking boundaries series, which includes a wire barrier held up by blackened posts cast from the real-life agricultural fences that bisect their own ancestral land – and the cosy colonialism of a 19^th century botanical museum, Remnants of My Father raises other questions and tensions.

Moore notes that the land on the treasure map, won by his father’s family of convict descendants, actually sits on the eastern edge of the Kamilaroi nation – Moore’s mother’s people, whose ancestral ties he traced back thousands of years in the chalk family tree of kith and kin.

"Gold may have existed all around him – he didn’t know."

A handful of gold-encrusted eucalyptus leaves also reflect on a 2013 CSIRO report Moore found, that explored how tree roots, thirsty for water, can absorb trace elements of heavy metals that, being toxic to the tree, are later expelled through their leaves.

“As the leaves fall to the ground that gold returns back to the earth,” Moore says. “And this would be the type of tree my father would remove in his earth-moving work. He’d be knocking down trees, clearing land and building dams and things like that.

“So gold may have existed all around him – he didn’t know.”

2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian: Yield Strength runs from February 27 to 8 June as part of Adelaide Festival. The biennial’s Vernissage Weekend of talks and events runs from February 26 – 28.