STOLEN GOLD: Joshua Searle

STOLEN GOLD

Joshua Searle

Curated by Emily McCulloch Childs

Flinders Hotel, Flinders Fringe Festival 2024

https://joshuasearle.com/page/2-STOLEN%20GOLD.html

https://flindersfringe.com.au

Michael Grey’s ‘Pre-Columbian Art’, Thames and Hudson, 1978, was a seminal book on artworks from Central & South America held in the collections of museums, most noticeably the British Museum. Part of a series, the Thames & Hudson books on art formed a significant canonical text, appearing in school libraries across the world. They informed generations of thinking about such objects, colonial collections of museums, the origins of which were created by Empire.

The British Empire was the largest and most aggressively expansive of the European colonial superpowers. The fields of archaeology and anthropology were born as colonial activities, and thousands of objects were taken from societies across the globe to be housed in the empire’s colonial epicentre in London’s British Museum.

Joshua Searle is an Australian born artist of Colombian and settler colonial (Australian Irish) descent. He was born and raised on Bunurong/Boon Wurrung Country, on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne. The Peninsula has a fraught colonial history, where colonial settlers cleared its forested land for farming, and was the site of a Quarantine Station built to help manage the pandemics created by the British Empire: most particularly smallpox.

When a friend gifted him a copy of Grey’s book that he had found in a local op shop, Searle’s first response was of anger at the assumption of the title. ‘Columbia’ refers to the 15th century Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who led an exploration into South America. The categorisation of ‘Pre-Columbian’ is used to define the time period of societies in the Americas as referencing Columbus, with no recognition given to the extraordinary Indigenous societies existing independently of European endeavour.

The works in Grey’s opus include remains of exemplary cultural societies. Most significantly for Searle, and the starting point for his series, are the Quimbaya, one of the Indigenous societies of the Bogotá Plain. Famous for their skill as goldsmiths, they excelled in the lost wax technique, a technique whose invention is more commonly attributed to the ancient Greeks. The Quimbaya used gold as a way of accessing the spirit world through the animal world, and of reverence for their god, the sun. Their concept of gold was starkly different from the Europeans’, whose lust for gold was driven by greed, and who raided the Colombians of their gold as they destroyed their societies. The myth of El Dorado, which was not a city, but an Indigenous chief, originates from this area.

The impact of Spanish colonisation has impacted knowledge of Searle’s ancestry. The various small Indigenous groups became absorbed into large cities such as the capital Bogotá, which today is a cultural capital, containing 120 public galleries and museums, including El Museo del Oro (The Bogotá Museum of Gold). Although it is practically impossible to know his full identity due to this displacement and disruption wrought by colonial powers, his artwork concepts nonetheless represent the history and experiences of his ancestors. Furthermore they provide the basis for an examination into his identity as a diasporic Australian.

By referencing these artworks, called ‘objects’ or ‘artefacts’ in colonial lexicon, in painting, the medium of the Great European Masters, Searle undertakes a process of reclamation. This includes his own identity as part of the colonial diaspora, and of the works themselves, as a reclamation of art and the skill of their makers (the peoples of the Bogotá plain are known as amongst the world’s finest goldsmiths, producing gold work so fine as to be almost filigree, and the significance of the pieces (many taken from religious ceremony).

The seed for this project began with a painting of the Colombian gold mask featured in the book, held in the collection of the British Museum. Titled ‘British Museum, London’, the work features a black mask on a yellow background, with black text that reads the works title underneath. It shows the way in which these works are now held as part of the stolen wealth of empire, and identified as belonging to the British.

This work inspired the creation of a significant body of new work. He embarked on a series of sketches, done on cardboard in his studio, in oil pastel and permanent marker or ink. Each one explores an image: an Aztec double-headed serpent, a Colossal Olmec head, a ceramic Tiahuanaco Llama, a gold Colombian figure. Many of these are held in museum collections around the world, most significantly in the British Museum.

This initial examination of collective culture identity and societal impact led to a more individual personal exploration in sketches. These include works exploring his own family’s identity and impact of colonisation, and his own loss of language and cultural knowledge.

From these sketches, Searle then created a further body of paintings, done in a variety of paint: acrylic, enamel, oil stick, spray paint, artist’s ink.

Created using a process of research and development, examining Colombia and Australia’s past and colonialism, the works held in the British Museum and Colombian museums, conversations and interviews with family members, they now form a major body of work: ‘STOLEN GOLD’ and ‘STOLEN GOLD in monochrome’.

These paintings are striking in colour, style, scale and power. Often reduced down to the line work of the object, they create direct, emotional impact. The colours and use of materials such as spray paint bring them into the contemporary age, into Searle’s generation.The works draw upon the strength and skills of his ancestors, the great artists and societies of Central America, as an affirmation of sophistication and complexity, the antithesis of the othering mythology created by the colonial machine.

They are bold and political, but also very personal. Through them, the artist has undergone a fundamental reclamation of self. He has learnt of complex and skilled societies, whose artists created works of such skill they are still not fully understood today. Whilst living on land far away from these societies, this project has led him to discover much hidden history, which he then brings the audience into, enlightening them and leading them to explore their own past and other cultures.

The monochromatic works bring us even further into a reduced set of commentary on our current society, and where the artist sits in the world, how he sees and what he feels. It is socio-cultural but also again deeply personal, and we are fortunate to be given a view into his mind and its reflections of the past and contemporary world.

Emily McCulloch Childs, 2024

Texts:

Michael Grey, Pre-Columbian art, Thames & Hudson UK, 1978

Clemencia Plazas, Amelicia Santacruz Alvarez, Meyby Rios Cardenas, Hector Garcia Botero, Molas: Capas De Sabiduría, Layers of Wisdom, Museo Del Oro, Bogota, Colombia, 2017, 2021.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quimbaya

Julie Jones, ed., The art of Precolumbian gold: the Jan Mitchell collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985 https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/119535

El Dorado: City of Gold
Lost Cities with Albert Lin, National Geographic

El Dorado: Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia Exhibition, British Museum 2013
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/15/british-museum-el-dorado-exhibition

‘Pupuni Mantiminga (Fine Lines)’ Munupi Arts at Everywhen Artspace

Almost a decade has passed since I visited Munupi Arts and interviewed the most senior elder of Melville Island, the late artist, knowledge holder and great story teller, Justin Puruntatameri: click below to read

We Are Tiwi: The art and artists of Munupi Arts

My research was part of a State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship on the Australian colonial frontier and Indigenous resistance. I was extremely fortunate to be able to interview Puruntatameri about the extensive Tiwi resistance at nearby Fort Dundas (Punata), the first British settlement in the Northern Territory. 

I found him waiting for me one morning at his spot at the back of the art centre, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. While we spoke, they listened attentively. He was a great teacher, a man of much knowledge. His extensive knowledge of local flora and fauna had been published, he had been featured in The Australian newspaper as the most senior traditional leader in the small Melville Island community of Pirlangimpi, a great new artist drawing comparison to Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, a ‘distinct’ voice of the old Tiwi: he was estimated to be the most respected ‘culture man’ on both the Tiwi Islands.

Puruntatameri was born at Kadipuwu, next to the miscalculated site where the British would build their short-lived fort. His knowledge of the fort, which lasted from 1824-9, was extensive and he told me of events and features not previously documented. 

Together with Munupi staff we walked around the old fort and trenches, commenting that the British would think trenches would be any use against the Tiwi spears. Puruntatameri showed me the two tutini he had made, those famous sculpture headstones made in the final stage of the pukumani ceremony, for the doctor and officer who had been killed by the Tiwi as retribution for the British capture of their warrior Tambu, an act of war. 

I asked him why he had made these beautiful works for outsiders who had settled on his people’s land in such a brutal way. ‘I felt sorry for them,’ he said ‘having no headstone.’

This is revealing of the Tiwi’s generosity and nature, as it is of their use of art to express the deep cycles of life; birth, creation, death, and to communicate with each other and with outsiders.

In a subsequent catalogue essay for an exhibition of Munupi Arts held at Artitja Fine Art in South Fremantle, I wrote of the ‘sophisticated geometric design and meditative mark making, a balanced fusion of contemporary adaptation and classical tradition, and the strength of generations of culturally significant families which underlie Munupi Arts.’

The art centre had, I noted, ‘in recent years blossomed into a new life brought about through the art practice of older masters, bringing a renewed energy and traditional vigour to the art.’

This continues in the contemporary art movement today: in paintings by Munupi foundational artist Thecla Bernadette Puruntatameri, mid-generation Delores Tipuamantumirri, and the new generation artists Alison Puruntatameri and Karina Coombes.

Justin Puruntatameri passed away just several months after I visited and interviewed him. His passing left a great gap in the Tiwi world and the Australian arts. 

It is wonderful to see his legacy continuing on through the work of Munupi artists and his grandchildren, represented in this exhibition, of which I believe he would have been very proud. It continues a great addition to the magnificent cultural lexicon that is the art of Munupi Arts. 

Emily McCulloch Childs, 2023

22 September-10 October

Everywhen Artspace

https://everywhenart.com.au/exhibitions/

I’m Sick of Being Polite: Joshua Searle catalogue essay

Monphell House

Friday 26 May 6-10 PM

Sat Sun 27 28 May 12-4 pm

Catalogue essay: I’m Sick of Being Polite Joshua Searle

I’m sick of being polite
Joshua Searle

Monphell House
7-9 Brunswick Road
Brunswick East
Opening May 26 2023
6-10 pm
Runs May 26-28 2023

Web: Joshua Searle I’m Sick of Being Polite

‘If there still exists a meaningful history of Australian art, it lies precisely in this irresolvable knot of black and white, this infinitely held-out promise of reconciliation between races.’1

Rex Butler

‘My intention is in keeping with the integrity of my work in which appropriation and citation, sampling and remixing are an integral part, as are attempts to communicate a basic underlying humanity to the perception of ‘blackness’ in its philosophical and historical production within western cultural contexts. The works I have produced are ‘notes’, nothing more, to you and your work.’ 

Gordon Bennett, Notes to Basquiat

Gordon Bennett’s Notes to Basquiat was written by the Australian artist in 1998, after being invited to have his work exhibited at the Gramercy Park Hotel Art Fair, New York. What followed was a lengthy series of the artist referencing and sampling Basquiat in paintings, made from 1999-2004. 

Bennett’s artwork ‘Notes to Basquiat: Be Polite’, was painted in 1998, the year of Australian-Colombian artist Joshua Searle’s birth. The work from which Searle draws on for the title of this exhibition was painted in acrylic on paper, and posthumously was used as the title of a retrospective & publication of Bennett’s works on paper held at the IMA.2 It was through this publication that Searle encountered Bennett’s work in a deeper sense; he has never seen more than an occasional image of Bennett’s in real life, in a gallery, and never viewed an entire exhibition of his.

Comprised of 12 new works painted almost entirely in monochrome, this exhibition ‘I’m Sick of Being Polite’ explores Western society’s and particularly, colonial binary constructions of race: ‘White’ and ‘Black’, which exist in diametrically opposed positions within society.3

This body of work, produced in 2023, was sketched first, as Searle often does, onto flattened cardboard beer boxes, then painted on larger canvas. Concepts and constructs of ‘Whiteness’ and ‘Blackness’ are examined using the English language, the language of the British Empire, that which has become for much of global society, both the coloniser and the colonised, the only tongue. Words appear on or under the surface of the paintings, at times clear, at times running down the canvas with Searle’s now signature use of dripping paint, indicating tears of mourning for colonial destruction of Indigenous culture, of loss, and of violence inflicted by the dominant settler colonial state. 

Only two works contain any use of colour: a blood red in the title work, and a corn yellow, a motif used throughout Searle’s work. It discusses the impact of colonisation on agriculture and food in South America, symbolized by the homogenisation of corn, a staple food source, once multi coloured, now mono coloured into a singular yellow. 

Searle’s early works showed the profound influence of Haitian-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. This current progression has now broadened to include Bennett, and his own response to Basquiat, bringing his influence into the contemporary context, as a ‘Letter to Bennett’, which Searle sees the title work of his exhibition as being. It has involved a continuing deep examination of and engagement with Searle’s continued exploration of self and his own socio-cultural history. Both Basquiat and Bennett’s work discussed and referenced so much cultural, social and political history, that reflecting on their work makes them appear almost as a one-artist art movement.4 This series of Searle’s is, he says ‘an ode of respect to the pioneers of Black art.’ 

Like Bennett, Searle’s work uses both humour and seriousness to discuss colonial power relations. The title work ‘I’m Sick of Being Polite’ includes red in its black on white text, which may be a reference to blood. For Bennett, 

‘Blood is a potent symbol and has historically been a measure of Aboriginality.
In the past ‘Quadroon’, was a socially acceptable term used to label Indigenous
people as a way of establishing genetic heredity. The ‘purer’ the bloodlines, the
more Aboriginal you were. Mixing of pure ‘blood’ with European ‘blood’ was feared
by Europeans, ‘authenticity’ was at risk and identity diluted.’5

‘I’m Sick of Being Polite’ is also a reference by Searle to the history of the laws of racial etiquette, and to the politics around social existence. For Black and Indigenous people living under frontier colonialism, behaviour was governed by the state, with punishment for deviation from a continual behavioural policing and self-policing.6 This authoritarian history continues today, wherein people of colour must constantly self-police their behaviour, in order not to be perceived as embodiments of racial stereotypes, which are always negative. Research into this has found that such constant self-policing comes at great psychological cost, leading to burn out and impact on mental health.7

This exhibition considers the changing historical constructs of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’, within Searle’s diasporic country, Australia. ‘The idea of what is ‘black’ and what is ‘white’ is’, he says, ‘a construct. It has grown, shrunk, and morphed over time. There was a time in Australia, for example, where Italians weren’t considered white.’ In his work ‘What is White’, he references the ways in which ‘the terms of whiteness are continually changing, for example under the White Australia policy, there was a ‘One drop policy’ denoting ‘Blackness’.’ Affirmations of reclamation of Blackness are considered in works such as ‘I LOVE BLACK’, which was inspired by listening to a podcast interview with artist Jammie Holmes, who when asked what his favourite colour is, stated simply ‘I love black’. Searle says this work is a response to ‘Othering language, Colonial language that has the aim of ‘Othering’ Black and Indigenous peoples.’ It is a reaffirming statement of Blackness, viewing the self positively, with the black paint bleeding through into white text.

The work ‘Everything is Black’ concerns the origins of culture. There are, Searle says, ‘lots of things today that we have and use, that we don’t know the origins of. These include foods that have been colonised: such as South American foods: potatoes, tomatoes, corn.’ Like humans, these foods have become colonised, their Indigenous history erased. 

The musical inspiration and references that resonated with Basquiat and Bennett also find resonance for Searle with his similar love for hip hop. His work ‘Black Child’ was inspired by a Biggie Smalls album cover, and the song ‘Black Child’ by Birdz, a Butchulla hip hop artist, featuring Mojo Juju, a Wiradjuri Filipino artist, the music video filmed on Boon Wurrung/Bunurong Country, where Searle was born, raised, and still lives. It symbolises the perpetual perception of being seen a black child in colonised society, yet has an Afro hairstyle that is broken, referencing a halo, a Black angel child. 

A significant section of this exhibition concerns state violence against ‘othered’ bodies, which is viewed through the militant authorities of the settler-colonial culture, exemplified through the violence of police. These works include ‘Cops and Robbers’: a two-part set of canvases that work together, which play on the idea of black or white hoods. A black hood, as balaclava, symbolises Black crime, a white hood the Ku Klux Klan. In this context, black and white cultural signifiers shift context illustrating the multiple ways of viewing race. Another ‘double’ work, ‘Cell 1’ and ‘Cell 2’ was inspired by a performance at the Black Entertainment Television awards, and depict life size prison doors, illustrating how incarceration is an important factor around Blackness and Whiteness.

The work ‘Hooded Heads Can’t Speak’ symbolises what Searle calls ‘Silencing’, referencing American state torture of political prisoners at Guantanomo Bay, and the Australian state torturing of young Aboriginal people using spit hoods. This tool is used to silence, to ‘put a hood over somebody takes their rights away, is further used to torture them.’ This is explored further in the work ‘Hooded Heads Can’t Be Heard’. Here the text is redacted like military documents, symbolising the way in which activists and dissidents can ‘vanish’, by being taken by authorities in certain countries. The work contains ‘some corn and a business suit, a hood, scribbled in finger-paint.’ Corn appears again, an enduring symbol of Searle’s Colombian heritage, food being a significant part of identity. 

The work ‘Protesthis’ draws inspiration from activist and artist Ai Wei Wei, with Searle examining state violence towards protestors. It examines inequality, human rights abuses and displays of power. 

In 2007, Rex Butler wrote that Bennett could be considered as the ‘last ‘’Australian’’ artist,’ with his retrospective being not only of him, but ‘of a whole tradition of art in this country.’8 Since, we have seen a rich generation of artists influenced by and evolving from Bennett’s school, an explosion of voices reclaiming the ‘other side’ of colonisation and identity, an encyclopaedia of Blak, Brown, and ‘Othered’ artists, exploring and protesting the oppression of the continued Colonial State. With this new body of work, Searle adds to this important centralisation of resistance and discussion within “Australian” art, and the art of settler-colonies internationally, as a reclamation, assertion and expression of voices and imagery that is entirely crucial to our society.

1 Rex Butler, THE REVOLUTIONARY COLOURING HISTORY (review of Gordon Bennett retrospective, NGV), The Australian, 31/8/07

² ‘Gordon Bennett: Be Polite™’ curated by Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane where it was first presented in October 2015, touring then to the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2016, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2017 and McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Canada, 2018. From this exhibition a publication was produced, edited by the curators, with essays by Helen Hughes, Ian McLean and Julie Nagam, IMA and Sternburg Press (Berlin), 2016.

³ We can recall in particular the work of Franz Fanon, ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, which discusses colonisation, white supremacy and ‘phobogenesis’, a thing or person that elicits “irrational feelings of dread, fear, and hate” in a subject, and whose threat is often exaggerated. In the context of race, Fanon postulates that the black person is a phobogenic object, sparking anxiety in the eyes of white subjects. 

Derek Hook, “Fanon and the Psychoanalysis of Racism,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Skin,_White_Masks
⁴ Rex Butler wrote: ‘There has been one revolution at least within living memory in Australian art: it was the coming together in 1971 of the schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon and the old men of Papunya to produce the phenomenon of contemporary Aboriginal art.
But there has perhaps been a second revolution that is in a way its echo, its extension, even its negation. We might date it from some time around 1987 when the artist Gordon Bennett started making his first paintings while attending Brisbane’s Queensland College of Art.’ Rex Butler, op cit

⁵ ‘As an Australian of both Aboriginal and Anglo Celtic descent, Bennett felt he had no access to his Indigenous heritage. He states: ‘The traditionalist studies of Anthropology and Ethnography have thus tended to reinforce popular romantic beliefs of an ‘authentic’ Aboriginality associated with the ‘Dreaming’ and images of ‘primitive’ desert people, thereby supporting the popular judgment that only remote ‘full–bloods’ are real Aborigines.’ Blood also speaks to the violence of the frontier and the continued violence of current colonial occupation, it ‘exposes the truth of colonial occupation – it was a ‘bloody’ conquest.’ https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/school_resource/gordon-bennett/

⁶ ‘The whole intent of Jim Crow etiquette boiled down to one simple rule: blacks must demonstrate their inferiority to whites by actions, words, and manners. Laws supported this racist code of behavior whenever racial customs started to weaken or breakdown in practice’ Jim Crow Museum 

https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2006/september.htm

⁷https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-costs-of-codeswitching

⁸ Rex Butler, ibid

Emily McCulloch Childs, May 2023

Joshua Searle: At the above catalogue essay

Joshua Searle – At the above

This solo exhibition of Joshua Searle (Australian/Colombian) explores themes relating to childhood, Black genius, joy, colonisation, urbanisation, cross-cultural experiences, industrialisation and psychology.

Featuring a new body of work, this is Searle’s fourth solo exhibition in a year since he held his first show in July 2021.

Continuing with his environmental practice of painting on and with found materials, including reclaimed canvas, real estate auction signs, cabinet doors, this series features his most ambitious scale to date, with large canvases that explore the inner workings of the mind and memory and childhood experiences of racism and violence.

Dragons feature throughout as a symbol drawn from childhood, along with Searle’s signature motifs of Western urbanisation and industrialisation: the car, towering buildings and smoke stacks. The exhibition delves into an exploration of colour and optics, experimenting with a mix of materials: acrylic paints, house paints, spray paints, oil sticks.

Painted to the genius of Kendrick Lamar’s Bricolage rap they explore issues of identity and investigate the history of cultural and financial theft by empire: gold Colombian masks held in the collection of the British Museum, the practice of redlining which denied people access to fundamental rights of housing and security, the exploitative or slave labour of resource production. These are countered with joyful colours and strong representations, reclamation of the artist’s self, through self portraits and use of the bright, bold colours drawn from his heritage.

View exhibition

At the above
Level 1, 198 Gertrude St
Fitzroy, 3065
Australia
info@attheabove.com.au

Donna Brown & The Indigenous Jewellery Project

Everywhen Artspace and The Indigenous Jewellery Project is proud to present a special NAIDOC Week exhibition: Donna Brown: Gumbaynggirr Jeweller, a new exhibition of jewellery by Nambucca Valley, mid-north coast NSW based artist Donna Brown (Gumbaynggirr).

Brown uses silver, copper, silk, enamel and emu feathers to create ethereal necklaces and chest pieces relating to her heritage and local Dreamings. Emu tracks, astronomy and fresh water/salt water imagery are strongly represented in her work.

Donna Brown has exhibited nationally as a painter, printmaker, textile artist, illustrator and jeweller, and has several of her works held in public gallery collections including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Brown has been a workshop facilitator working for Aboriginal art centres such as Mornington Island Art Centre, Queensland, facilitating metal and felt jewellery workshops.

This exhibition evolves from a project created by Everywhen co-director Emily McCulloch Childs, The Indigenous Jewellery Project (IJP), a national contemporary jewellery project working with Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander jewellers in workshops held on Country with UNSW lecturer Melinda Young, in order to develop a platform for Indigenous contemporary jewellery.

In 2021 IJP partnered with the Australian Design Centre, Create NSW and Jaanymili Bawrrungga, an Aboriginal organisation in Bawrrungga (Bowraville) NSW, in a workshop and professional development project, with works available at the ADC Object online store. A selection of these works are currently on display in the Object Space Window at Australian Design Centre.

Brown had previously been part of Shiny Shiny Blak Bling, a Melbourne based collective of Aboriginal jewellers who worked with jeweller Peter Eccles in developing silversmithing practice. This collective had been one of the inspirations for the creation of The Indigenous Jewellery Project. In a lovely circumstance of fate, IJP began working with one of the artists that had led to its creation, and from this well this current exhibition was born.

It explores Brown’s Aboriginal heritage, silversmithing training and development working with IJP and subsequently remotely continuing the relationship between curator and artist, and brings the beauty and natural world from the artist’s coastal and forest home to the Mornington Peninsula.

Emily Beckley: Connexions Indian Ocean Craft Triennial

Connexions

Indian Ocean Craft Triennial

SEPTEMBER 28, 2021 – OCTOBER 16, 2021

Emily Beckley, Fatemeh Boroujeni, Eden Lennox, Sultana Shamshi, Melissa Cameron, Blandine Hallé

Curated by Blandine Halle and Melissa Cameron

With a mission to show the complexity and diversity of Australian jewellery talent to audiences outside this country, Connexions invited artists from a range of cultural backgrounds to share their works. On display are new pieces by Emily Beckley – Indigenous artist from Horn Island in the Torres Strait; Fatemeh Boroujeni – an ethnic Bakhtiari who was born in Iran; Eden Lennox – Perth artist with Jewish, Irish, French, and Australian ancestry; Sultana Shamshi – born in Bombay, India, has lived Europe, Southeast Asia and for a long time Perth; Melissa Cameron – former immigrant to the USA, recently returned; and Blandine Hallé – born in France, lives in Perth and Paris.

Connexions had a pandemic-abbreviated debut at the Parcours Bijoux International Triennial in 2020 at Galerie Assemblages in France and will finally be shown in full at IOTA21 in Perth.

See the nuanced and diverse works we have created, highlighting the depth and richness of cultural influence, and talent, in this place.

Emily Beckley acquired by the National Gallery of Australia

Emily Beckley, Sabagorar Susueri (Bridal Necklace), 2019, silver (oxidised), silk, 85 x 90 x 2 mm (pendant size). Photo Melinda Young

Emily Beckley’s work Sabagorar Susueri has been acquired for National Gallery of Australia‘s Art Cases Program.

 The National Gallery of Australia Art Cases is a free outreach program coordinated through the NGA’s Touring Exhibitions team which involves lending art filled suitcases to schools, libraries, galleries, aged-care homes and other community organisations across Australia. The program was developed to provide an opportunity for people of all ages to experience and handle works of art. The cases travel to venues individually or in pairs, with each case containing six works. The works have been chosen to generate discussion and an enthusiasm for art, and the cases are used for art-making activities, storytelling, school outreach and Art and Dementia programs. 

Thanks to the generous support of the Neilson Foundation, NGA has refurbished the existing three cases and expanding the program to a total of five cases. This includes undertaking a thematic rearrangement of the works, acquiring additional works which add to the diversity of artists and art practices represented and updating the education kit and other accompanying resources. 

Emily Beckley

Year of Birth: 1965

Language Groups: Meriam Mir, Kala Lagaw Ya

Place of Birth:  Thursday Island, Torres Strait Islands, Queensland, Australia

Emily Beckley is an artist based on Horn Island, Torres Strait Islands, Queensland. She belongs to the language groups Meriam Mir and Kala Lagaw Ya. A trained painter, Beckley’s work in painting is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

Beckley’s art is often concerned with reviving and maintaining cultural practice from her Meriam Mer ancestry. She draws on her experiences along with the stories and history of her culture from her parents from the Meriam – Samsep of Mer and Panai of Mabuiag to create works in metal as a way to connect the past to the future. 

Her Contemporary Jewellery practice evolved through two workshops held by The Indigenous Jewellery Project (curator Emily McCulloch Childs and contemporary jeweller Melinda Young) during 2018, at Gab Titui Cultural Centre, Torres Strait Island and at ANU School of Art & Design Jewellery & Object Workshop.

The sabagorar pendant was originally carved as a bride’s pendant from a turtle shell and was part of the many items that was collected by Alfred C Haddon in 1898 during The Recording of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits. It is held in the collection of the British Museum. It has been approximately 120 years since this pendant was taken from Mer (Murray Island), Torres Strait, and decades since these pendants have been created. 
The recreation of this pendant in the contemporary era links the past to the present, which is of vital importance. This is done in order to revitalise an art practice in metal jewellery, which brings life to the beauty of a hidden treasure of Torres Strait art.

 

Bawrrungga Project: The Indigenous Jewellery Project & Australian Design Centre

In February 2021, the Indigenous Jewellery Project partnered with Australian Design Centre for a week of professional development workshops with Jaanymili Bawrrungga, a women’s group of Gumbaynggirr artists in the NSW mid-north coast town of Bawrrungga (Bowraville), 

The Gumbaynggirr have inhabited the area for thousands of years. The word Bowra comes from the Gumbaynggirr place name, Bawrrung, which possibly means cabbage tree palm, or ‘bullrout fish’, ‘scrub turkey’ or ‘bald head’. There is a strong tradition of wood carving and jewellery making, which continues today.

Gumbaynggirr artists were invited to participate in a five-day contemporary jewellery making workshop. The professional workshop was attended by local artists who were introduced to jewellery making techniques, taught by Melinda Young (UNSW) including saw piercing, metal texturing, heat patination, cold-joining, making jewellery findings and air-dry clay beads, knotting and cordage, all with a focus on working with natural materials including locally collected native timber and shells.

Outcomes included necklaces, earrings and bracelets.

Previously these artists have been learning painting and ceramics at the Nambucca Valley Phoenix Community Support Services run by Jaanymili Bawrrungga Inc and Arcadian Creative Management in Bowraville.

These workshops offer a positive opportunity for local women to learn new skills and share this knowledge in the broader community.

In May 2021 the artists exhibited their work in a pop-up exhibition in ADC Object Store. 

Artists included: Donna Brown, Jasmine Stadhams, Rebecca Stadhams, Lavinna Inglis, Monica Christine Inglis, Aunty Marjory Buchanon, Denise Buchanan, Anne Francine Edwards,  Yarra Stedhams, Annalisa Wilson.

This was the third Indigenous Jewellery Project workshop Australian Design Centre has produced in partnership with founding curator Emily McCulloch Childs and leading contemporary jeweller Melinda Young. 

This project was proudly supported by the NSW Government though Create NSW as part of Arts Restart.

 

Parcours Bijoux: Emily Beckley & Connexions

Emily Beckley, a Meriam Mer/Kala Lagaw artist who has been working with The Indigenous Jewellery Project for several years, is the first Indigenous Australian contemporary jeweller to exhibit in Paris, with new work featured in the exhibition Connexions at Parcours Bijoux 2020, Galerie Assemblages, Paris, 13-25 October 2020.

Connexions is curated by Blandine Hallé and Melissa Cameron. Our aim in its conception was to introduce an international audience to Australian contemporary jewellery, its breadth and depth. This became augmented by what we as organisers wanted to share about Australia, versus what was at the forefront of the news media at that time; namely the mass-murders in Christchurch, perpetrated by an Australian.

This exhibition evolved to be a counter-action of sorts, aiming to present a cross-section of Australian makers with cross-cultural backgrounds, while showcasing artists with multifarious and deep connections to the human body.

Selected for their existing contribution to this dialogue, each of our artists mines and/or interrogates their own histories for their artwork. Together the complex, nuanced and diverse works that we anticipate from these artists will, en masse, portray Australia as a community that respects difference and honours diversity and complexity, more effectively than any single dialogue in which we might hope to engage.

Contemporary jewellery relies upon the human body for transmission, making it the most accessible and personal art form. This body-to-body connection heightens the visual spectacle of the works while acting as an inlet for diverse people and cultures to interface through simultaneous interaction – wearing and viewing. Through this exhibit we aim to connect the audience to us, to share our Australian identity.

Artists: Blandine Hallé – Eden Lennox – Emily Beckley – Fatemeh Boroujeni – Melissa Cameron – Sultana Shamshi

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