The 29th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA)

Tiwi artist Timothy Cook has won the 29th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) with a stunning painting in natural pigments depicting an important traditional Tiwi ceremony. Kulama, in Cook’s signature ochre yellow, red, black and white, was awarded the $40,000 prize on Friday night at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Australia’s longest running Indigenous art award. Cook, a 53 year old, quiet man from Milikapiti, Melville Island, in the Tiwi Islands some 90 km north-west of Darwin, has been painting for some 13 years, and is the first Tiwi artist to win the award. At the announcement of his win on the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory lawns by the sea at sunset, he received enthusiastic applause from the audience, and was encouraged to perform his totemic Shark Dance with his fellow Tiwi friends and family, which he did, after much persuasion, with aplomb. It was a rare moment of pure joy in a oft-troubled industry that has suffered lately from much sorry business (the Aboriginal mourning following death), a damaged art market, low tourism, the social problems that plague Indigenous communities and the endless industry difficulties, from questionable dealers to the re-sale royalty (which is having the reverse intention of eliminating what was an important Aboriginalisation of the art industry, wherein artists successfully managed to be paid immediately for their works, rather than months later), and the Indigenous art-only code of conduct.
In an abrupt change from the awards of a few years ago, when there were many new media, photo media, photographic and conceptual installation works entered from Koori and Murri artists, and a highly-conceptual Murri artist (Danie Mellor) even won the award, this year there were few works in these mediums, and also few Koori entries in the final award exhibition (not one entry, for example, from Victoria or Tasmania). There was no New Media award given due to the lack of entries. Whilst the contemporary art world has embraced Indigenous artists from large towns and cities for their often cutting-edge art with its biting social commentary, their success in other areas and awards has led to less of these artists entering the NATSIAAs, feeling that it is no longer relevant to their careers.
Perhaps an emerging artist award could be a valid replacement, to new artists from all over Australia, with concerted effort to encourage artists from the south-eastern states to enter.
Cook’s work depicts the Kulama, an important increase ceremony, which is rarely held these days. It is an important work both artistically and culturally, due to the fading of cultural traditions plagueing Aboriginal society. When I visited Pirlangimpi (Garden Point), on Melville Island (Tiwi Islands) recently, the senior elder there Justin Puruntatameri (whose work, alongside his colleague’s Cornelia Tipuamantumeri was also included in this award) told me with great concern that the Kulama ceremony had not been held in his community for three years.
Cook’s work encompasses the Tiwi concept of Jilamara, which means ‘good design’: it is beautiful, strong, its composition well-balanced. I recently spoke with one of his long-time supporters, Gabriella Roy, of Aboriginal & Pacific Art, Sydney, who was exhibiting a work of his at the recent Melbourne Art Fair. She has been exhibiting Cook for some eleven years, and said that for many years, his work was difficult to sell. Tiwi art is much-admired by serious collectors, but its tribal rawness can be hard for the beginning eye to comprehend.

Raymond Zada, Racebook,  Giclée print on Hahnemuhle FineArt photo rag

The Work on Paper Award, Racebook, a digital print on paper, by emerging South Australian artist Raymond Zada, was the only conceptual winner. It received instant publicity from the media with its topical subject matter of racism on Facebook, with articles in The Age, The Financial Review, and The West Australian all leading with it and writing at length on it, rather than on the winner. The other winners, who are unquestionably more highly-skilled artists, were given far less immediate attention (articles that appeared later have however, written more broadly on the Award). While I commend Zada’s bold approach to confronting racism through art, his similarly important thoughtful reaction to contemporary issues which are played out through social media, the derivativeness of the work does give some cause for concern. The work’s design, consisting of large letters filled with small quotes of racist remarks, is perhaps too evocative of the Austracism series of works by Queensland artist Vernon Ah Kee.

Barbara Moore, Untitled, Synthetic polymer paint on linen 197 x 200 cm.

The General Painting Award was given to Barbara Moore, an Anmatyerre woman from Ti Tree in the Northern Territory who is based at Amata, South Australia, working through Tjala Arts. Her vibrant, expressionistic, painterly depiction of her country, described as ‘hyper-energetic’ by the judges (artist Bindi Cole, curator Glenn Iseger-Pilkington and academic Roger Benjamin), was powerful with its palette of rich yellows, reds, purples, pinks and oranges, subtle use of black and white, its broad sweeping brushstrokes depicting circular rockholes and important sites. While superficially abstract, her work is in fact deeply representative of the rockhole and soakage site she is depicting. The vast distances of country whose designs she has inherited ownership of recall that other great Anmatyerre painter, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. While language groups are distinct and land ownership is sacrosanct in Indigenous culture, there are often overlapping areas and people may belong to several language groups through their ancestry. As an Anmatyerre woman with connections to the vast area north and west of Alice Springs, now living in the Pitjantjatjara lands to the south, Moore’s paintings encompass several schools of Indigenous ‘desert’ art. The influence of her Pitjantjatjara colleagues’ extraordinary colourist and sophisticated landscape paintings, one of the most significant of all Australian landscape painting schools, has given her work a fresh, energetic vibrancy.

Djirrirra Wunungmurra, Yukuwa, Natural pigments on bark 236 x 100 cm.

The Buku-Larrnggay Mulka art centre in Yirrkala, east Arnhem Land, has been a consistent award winner at the NATSIAA, and this year was no different, with a stunning, elegant large bark, entitled Yukuwa, by Djirrirra Wunungmurra winning The Telstra Bark Painting Award. Yukuwai, a yam whose annual reappearance serves as a metaphor for the increase and renewal of people of their land, is depicted in delicate, intricate leaves and small flowers in a white ochre palette, with occasional use of a deep yellow ochre, on a flattened piece of Eucalyptus bark well over two metres tall. One would never guess that this beautifully calm work is in fact partly the result of an argument, when a family member challenged Wunungmurra’s right to paint bukyu, the fishtrap imagery of her clan and homeland. ‘Rather than argue’, her art centre explains, ‘she retorted by painting imagery that is in one sense her own personal identity’.  Its intention as an ‘almost self-portrait’ is also indicative of the wonderful complexity of Indigenous art, and its often secretive, mysterious constructions: for Yukuwa is one of the personal names of the artist. In Yolgnu society, one receives an invitation, in the form of an object representing a yam with strings emanating from it, with feather flowers at the end, to the ceremony held to strengthen relationships between clans belonging to the Yirritja moiety. The strings represent the kinship groups that are tied together.

Such an object is evocative of the winner of the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award (sponsored by Telstra), an almost abstracted sculptural depiction of Namorroddo, a malevolent being from the creation period (view video here). Comprised of paperbark, bush string, natural pigments, beeswax and feathers, the inky blackness of the ochre paint is in fact upon closer inspection a captivating deep indigo violet, highlighted with seven large white ochre shapes in a line around each side of the slim, tall spherical object, with delicate bush string emerging from either side, each finished with a small bunch of feather flowers. The artist, Jack Nawilil, is of the Rembarrnga language group, and lives in the central Arnhem Land community of Maningrida, a significant Arnhem land community renowned for its fibre work. Namorroddo, he says, flew through the air over great distances, like a ‘shooting star’, from Gapuwiyak in the east, westwards to Ramingining, descending on places to look for honey, to murder men and then alight again. He represents the Lightning Spirit in traditional Rembarrnga mythology, and the dangers of the night, the time when he travels. Nawilil’s work is both traditional and labour intensive, roots for dyes and bark must be gathered, soaked (the paperbark is soaked on the beach in saltwater), the string is made by vigorous, continuous rubbing on the thighs, the object itself constructed from extensive wrapping of the paperbark.
This years selection was the smallest in the history of the award, with only 63 works, from only 300 entries. And yet there were many beautiful works, although they may be becoming overly familiar to the indigenous art enthusiasts. Overall, the winners represented an important overview of contemporary Indigenous Australian art and some very fine and significant Australian artists.

Emma Stuart ‘The Blue Hour’ at Kick Gallery: opening talk

“The blue hour is the time of transition between night and day, between day and night. It is the twilight and the dawn.”

In her most recent series, The Blue Hour, Emma Stuart focuses on the sublime moments that take place as a day transitions to night and night to day. Stuart captures the liminal shift between light and shade, between what is revealed and what is hidden, between the point of focus and distorted peripheries.

All of the works in this latest suite of paintings are based on Stuart’s experience of living and working near the Todd River and its tributaries between Alice Springs and Telegraph Station in central Australia. For over 20 years Stuart has spent time in this part of the world describing this country as having a force not experienced anywhere else. The deep human history and current cultural complex are just as much a part of this energy as is the physical landscape. As the paintings have evolved so has her insight of self, solitude, and connections with people and place.

I greatly enjoyed viewing these works, speaking with Emma about them, and reflecting on the Alice Springs landscape, as in my notes for the talk below.

Emma Stuart, ‘The Blue Hour’, Kick Gallery, 2015: opening talk

Emma has been visiting the Central Australia region for 20 years. She had an immediate connection with the Warlpiri people at Yuendumu (300 km nw of Alice), fell in love with the place, and continued visiting regularly. It had always been a desire of hers to go and paint there.

This series came out of visiting Todd River bed, and the walk to the Telegraph Station, in the early morning and at dusk with her mother, who is also an artist.

A few things struck me about this latest series of Emma’s: firstly, that it was unusual for several reasons; particularly the intimate close-up nature of the style of her landscape painting.

When I visit Alice Springs the aspect of the landscape I am most struck by, especially after flying in from a city like Melbourne, is the sense of vast open space. The big Central Australian sky, would be, if I were a landscape painter, tempting to paint. I would feel compelled to depict large landscapes. But Emma cleverly avoids this obvious tendency, and reaches further and deeper, into a more complex, sensitive and nuanced response to the landscape.

Another aspect these works brought to my mind was my first visit to Alice Springs, some 12 years or so ago. I went for a walk by myself along the Todd River bed. As I was walking, I felt overpowered and in awe of these beautiful ghost gums, and I kept seeing people, Aboriginal people, moving amongst them. Some were there, and some were not. Some disappeared into the trees when I turned to look at them. I asked my friend the Anmatyerre/Alyawarre artist from Utopia, Barbara Weir, herself an expert landscape painter, about this. She told me that the reason I was seeing these people, or spirits, was because the land in Alice is still sung, it was still alive, whereas the land in Melbourne did not have enough Aboriginal people left to sing it, so it was therefore  ‘dead’ land. I saw this with all due respect to the Wurendjeri people upon whose land we stand, and am also in awe of the continued strength of tradition here, in Collingwood, just up the road for example, is a place where Aboriginal people have been meeting for thousands of years, and still do today. It is the end-point of a songline which runs for thousands of kilometres across the land.

When I saw Emma’s tree portraits, I was reminded of this moment, and felt that she felt these living tree spirits too. Through discussion with her, I was struck by how astute and sensitive she was to this environment, and how she, as great artists and poets do, subconsciously picked up on elements in our environment and landscape that few people are aware of.

In conversation, Emma has said to me that she ‘wanted to capture the intimacy and personalities of trees’, particularly the majestic gums, such as the ghost gums, native to Central Australia, the largest and oldest of which she describes as being ‘like Kings’.

The Central and Western Desert Aboriginal language groups’ have as a fundamental philosophical and religious concept known as life essence, in which every living thing: trees, plants, animals, every single blade of grass, and even rocks, contain a life essence. My Maori whanau call it mana; life force, power, spiritual power.

Through her close-up, realist style, expertly executed in oil paint, Emma has captured the life essence of these gum trees, and brought them into being, not as objects as they are often rendered by Western society, but as animate and alive as humans.

Secondly, through her work, I began thinking about the Australian landscape tradition, in particular, the landscape tradition of Central Australia. Of course the first name that springs to mind is that of Albert Namatjira. Namatjira, as a Western Arrernte man, related to the ghost gums of his country as totemic ancestors. When out driving with Luritja and Arrernte artists I have been struck by the way they wave at certain gum trees; when I ask who they are waving to, they answer ‘that old man’, a creation ancestor.

When I began thinking about the Central Australian landscape tradition, I realised that it was quite lacking in a strong school or compelling level of artistic representation. Leaving aside the hundreds of majestic landscape painters of the Aboriginal schools, and the Hermannsburg School in particular, there are few outsiders that have captured the striking and to me hauntingly beautiful landscape of the Alice Springs region. Sidney Nolan came close, but his most striking work was, for me, of the Musgrave Ranges, many hundreds of kilometres to the south, in South Australia. Nolan painted the landscape big: powerful, overwhelming, bright, colourful, as reminiscent of the observations of the first non-Aboriginal explorers. He saw it as a land haunted by drought; perhaps he lacked Fred Williams’ sensitivities to forests and was also viewing the land with Eurocentric eyes, failing to see the myriad living elements of the Central Australian bush.

I believe that Emma has been one of the first Australian artists to really lift the level of Central Australian landscape painting, and to really see it, with eyes sensitively attuned to it. Unlike our Impressionist painters, she has not depicted Australian landscape as a beautiful but harsh, overpowering ‘wilderness’ to be tamed by the heroic pioneer, always a male. Streeton had a wonderful love for trees and was an early environmentalist, but was also a man of his era, continuing a European landscape tradition.

Emma has responded to the landscape, and the light, of Central Australia in a powerful way that heralds a new direction and understanding of the true beauty of the Australian environment. Not an environment to be tamed and made into a faux copy of Europe, nor one to be feared and controlled. She lets the trees and light speak to her, and responds in paint. It is a significant shift in Australian art and one which needs recognition and encouragement.

I am moved by the way she has had the patience and humility to let these majestic beings speak to her, and her skill and obvious highly-skilled technical abilities in depicting her observations and her respect for and relationship with these magnificent tree beings.

And I thank her and Kick Gallery director, Jake Hoerner, for bringing a little bit of Alice Springs to Melbourne, for those of us who miss it, despite not being from there, but who hold it in our hearts and souls.
Emily McCulloch Childs, Melbourne, April 2015

‘The Blue Hour’ runs April 16 – May 03 2015 at Kick Gallery.

Kick Gallery is located at 4 Peel Street Collingwood & open Thursday-Saturday 12-5pm | Sunday 12-4pm & by Appointment

For further information contact Kick Gallery on 9415 8483 or email info@kickgallery.com