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/

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

Bulay(i): Buku-Larrnggay Mulka and The Indigenous Jewellery Project

Catalogue essay for Australian Design Centre exhibition: Bulay(i): Buku-Larrnggay Mulka & The Indigenous Jewellery Project

Exhibition images by Simon Cardwell

As one of Australia’s most prestigious and internationally recognised Aboriginal-owned art centres, Buku-Larrŋggay Mulka in Yirrkala, the Yolŋu community outside of Nhulunbuy (Gove) in North East Arnhem Land, is well-recognised for both practicing and maintaining artistic and cultural tradition and creating exciting innovation with its art.

An art centre is a not for profit community business owned by Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander artists, run by a board, with staff appointed as managers or co-ordinators, as they are still called at Buku-Larrnggay. It is a uniquely Australian invention, invented long before the acronyms NFP and NTO became buzz words in the new business model world.

Established in 1976, Buku-Larrnggay Mulka works with many artists living in Yirrkala and its satellite homelands within a several hundred km radius. Artists have exhibited in many of Australia’s top public and commercial galleries, including as part of the Biennale of Sydney at the MCA, the NGA, AGNSW,  NGV,  NMA and internationally including the Istanbul Biennial and in the exhibition Marking the Infinite, Newcomb Museum of Art, touring USA.

The art centre has a close proximity to an airport and accommodation at nearby Nhulunbuy. Along with its fame for significance in land rights, it is rich in art and music (home of Yothu Yindi and family with nearby Elcho Island’s the late Dr. G. Yunupiŋgu), and the home of the yiḏaki or dhambiḻpiḻ (didgeridoo), and Garma Festival.

On any given day, one may encounter collectors and gallery directors from America, professors from Canberra, top Australian public gallery curators, important politicians (often a Prime Minister), or famous musicians, actors or artists. This is amidst the constant stream of fascinated tourists visiting for the rich culture, beautiful tropical scenery and world-class fresh seafood that the region has to offer, especially now that Yirrkala boasts a Yolŋu-owned and operated tourism business, Lirrwi Tourism.

Buku-Larrŋggay Mulka has long been a leading studio in printmaking, and is world famous for its tradition of bark painting and sculpture, with large commissions including The Kerry Stokes Collection of 95 larrakitj poles and accompanying encyclopedic book.

More recently these artists have explored new media in their art, working with computer programming, film and virtual reality with the Mulka Project. The centre’s dedicated archival and film project, it is now one of its major forces in working with younger generations full of the artistic genius that seems to spring up everywhere in this historically significant place.

As well as painting, sculpture, new media and printmaking, craft has always been well maintained here. The art centre is a treasure trove of stunning fibre work by Yolŋu women, inventive small wooden carvings and objects and of course jewellery.

Strands of necklaces, called girring’girring in Yolŋu matha, the lingua franca of the region’s many languages, hang in the art centre, delighting visitors who visit in a seemingly endless stream.

Whilst the jewellery practice from this region, consisting mostly of necklaces strung with extremely fine seed beads, shells and shark vertebrae, has long been noted and admired, appearing in the groundbreaking exhibition Art on a String (Louise Hamby and Diana Young, Object: Australian Design Centre for Craft & Design, 2001), Bulay(i) is the first jewellery-focused project held at Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka.

Bulay(i)
Yolngu Matha language
rich jewellery, gold, precious stones, bronze, treasure.

Bulay(i) is ‘old Yolngu’. It may refer to the treasures of the neighbouring Macassans, over the sea, who Yolngu have had a long relationship with. All of this exhibition is Bulay(i): not just the metals, the first metal jewellery made at Yirrkala. The natural materials are also precious.

Bulay(i) is the fourth Indigenous contemporary jewellery project undertaken by The Indigenous Jewellery Project. IJP is national: and has ranged from workshops in the Torres Strait Islands, to Ernabella (Pukatja) in Pitjantjatjara lands in northern South Australia, to Haasts Bluff on Luritja land in the Western Desert, and now with the Yolngu in north east Arnhem Land. It is the first contemporary jewellery project held at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka.

The Indigenous Jewellery Project is an attempt to address a gap, or rather two gaps. The first national contemporary jewellery project undertaken with Indigenous jewellers, it aims to provide a presence of Indigenous jewellers within the Australian contemporary jewellery context, and a contemporary jewellery presence within the Aboriginal art context.

The project has been inspired by many things: my collection of Indigenous jewellery, interactions with contemporary jewellers, being half New Zealander and seeing the now tradition of Maori contemporary jewellery, similar projects within Aboriginal art undertaken in printmaking (Basil Hall, Martin King), or weaving (Arnhem Land, Tjanpi Desert Weavers). The ways in which Arnhem Land art centres have worked with their skilled craftspeople in weaving to showcase the sophistication of their art.

IJP began because of an interest, and a need. Along the way in my path as a curator, I had the good fortune to cross paths with contemporary jewellers. They have taught me much about their genre of art, and through my own research into Aboriginal jewellery and body adornment I have seen the need for more development in this area. Of course it is largely a women’s art practice; although Aboriginal men do make jewellery and every one of our workshops has had male jewellers, from age six to adult. But it is undoubtably Aboriginal jewellery’s status as ‘women’s craft’ that has kept it out of the canon of Art.

The artists already working in such a way, such as Lola Greeno, Maree Clarke, and Julie Gough, for example, have illustrated the potential for the use of traditional Indigenous jewellery with contemporary jewellery as a powerful art medium created for the gallery space.

But for jewellers who live in the very remote areas, there is little access to contemporary jewellery influences, teachers or materials. We must come to them.

This project is a vision for a new kind of curating. I call it interactive or pro-active curating. Beyond the role of being a receiver of art, the concept of ‘curator’ may have originated from the museum, but is evolving. A new curatorial premise can include being the initiator of art projects. Curators are in a position to see the gaps. We have minds similar to artists, but yet not exactly like theirs. We don’t have their impetus to communicate visually, to make with the hands, but we understand them and what they create effects us strongly. We want to help bring their creations to the world. We are the Dhuwa to their Yirritja: we complement each other, we are in a symbiosis: this is our natural state.

Girring’girring

‘All art springs from the soil.’
Geoffrey Bardon

Traditional Yolngu jewellery is now well-known and recognised mainly due to its use of incredibly fine seed beads, often strung on long necklaces that can be wrapped around the neck two or even three times. These long necklaces are a direct descendent of ceremonial necklaces.

I recall first becoming familiar with these necklaces, and being astonished at the fineness of them, the skill of the makers. I was almost intimidated by their fineness, especially when compared to the larger necklaces of Central Australia I was more used to. And then there was the shark and fish cartilage. What jewellery genius eons ago had first thought to string beads from this material? The whiteness of the cartilage has such pure beauty: it recalls white ochre, and the whiteness of ceremonial feathers. The shape of the cartilage is sculptural, with small rhythmic holes like dots made by a skilled artist. The skill of these jewellers is in making art from nature’s materials.

It took several events to get to this stage: the first was discovering that Buku-Larrnggay Mulka’s long-term art co-ordinator, Will Stubbs, shared a similar fascination for these necklaces and their tradition as I do. During a visit to the art centre, he showed me a collection of girring’girring, made by women of this Miwatj region, including out on very remote tiny islands, that is significantly beautiful. Two of these necklaces have since been exhibited, at Tactile Arts, Darwin. They are comprised of shark cartilage but also the blue bone of parrot fish, an example we have in this exhibition is by the exemplary necklace jeweller Madinydjarr Yirrinyina #2 Yunupiŋu.

Together Will and I set out on making a jewellery project at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka happen.

The second event was the knowledge of contemporary jeweller and UNSW lecturer Melinda Young, whose become my partner in jewels with much of The Indigenous Jewellery Project. Before the workshops Melinda researched ways we could help fix the problems of the necklaces, which to us was mainly the fact that they were strung on fishing line: not something a jeweller would consider a suitable stringing material. Melinda helped bring in proper jeweller’s materials, and during the first workshop in particular she undertook much research & development into the issues with the necklaces.

She had science experiments going on the verandah of the house we were staying in, little bits of wire with seed beads on them, in various states. When her research was concluded she was overjoyed: the seed beads had ‘worked’ in the way she wanted them to. From observing the Yolngu jewellers, she noticed how they used fresh seeds, allowing them to dry on their string. The amount the seed shrank when dry caused gaps in the necklaces. Now, strung in our workshops, they have gaps but they look beautiful as there is no plastic fishing line to be seen. In fact, now that they are strung on silk, they are made from 100 % natural materials. They are now much stronger, more durable and infinitely more wearable than ever before.

The workshops

‘Art is a way of establishing connections between people across cultures.’
Professor Howard Morphy, Djalkiri: We are standing on their names, Blue Mud Bay (Djambawa Marawili, Marrirra Marawili, Liyawaday Wirrpanda, Marrnyula Mununggurr, Mulkun Wirrpanda participated in a printmaking workshop with master printmaker Basil Hall at the community of Yilpara, North East Arnhem Land, working alongside Fiona Hall, John Wolseley, Jörg Schmeisser and Judy Watson, 2009)

‘When you aren’t pushing uphill: when it just flows, when you aren’t forcing it: that’s when you have entered the Aboriginal space, and it’s working.’
Kim Mahood, advice to me, Mulan community, Tanami desert, Western Australia, August 2017

Each time we arrive in North East Arnhem Land it seems like it is to some kind of ceremony. Twice now there’s been the new music festival, Yarrapay, on. For the second workshop as I arrived there appeared a perfect rainbow, arcing over the community store with its mural of the famous artists and leaders, adorned in traditional Yolngu body adornment. According to artist and Bulay(i) jeweller Marrnyula Mununggurr, it was welcoming us.

The rhythm of the day begins, lost in a rhythm of tiny seed beads, tiny shell beads, wax carving, all kinds of shapes and creatures and designs appearing.

We run out of beads and go gathering: this is just down the road usually, to where the jungle, the bush that surrounds us, encroaches upon the community. Thick tangles of vines, flowers: it all looks the same to me, but the jewellers spot each and every different kind of seed bead plant. They show me how and where to look: once you get your eye in it’s easy to spot the green seed pods everywhere. It takes me a while to figure out which seeds, encased inside their pods like tiny perfect rows of sleeping bead babes, are perfect for beads, and which are too old to use.

The best ones are green/yellow to orange, not too young or too old, turning red. The seeds start off green and move to yellow to orange to red to brown. They are as transformative as the mythological shapeshifter creator beings. The jewellers use these different colours to give design and rhythm to their necklaces.

Yolngu are saltwater people, and the sea is part of their traditional country.
Reference to the sea abounds in their art. The sea is fundamental to Bulay(i): in the materials, and subject matter of many totemic marine animals. There are myriad names in Yolngu matha for different kinds of fish, at different stages of their lives,
The natural world is always present in Yirrkala, and many of its artists live in homelands by the sea, or go ‘hunting’ on the weekends: gathering sea foods.

The first workshop established the core Bulay(i) crew. Making jewellery as a group seems to be an incredibly strong bonding exercise. It should be used by the United Nations, in mediation, in Parliament, to stop wars.  Our core jewellers include Marrnyula Mununggurr: an artist, daughter of the significant artist Nongirrnga Marawili, granddaughter of famed artist and leader Wonggu Mununggurr, Madatjula Yunupingu, the great earring maker, and Madinydjarr Yirrinyina #2 Yunupiŋu, an exemplary traditional jeweller. She lives on her homeland of Wanduway, and only comes into Yirrkala occasionally. We were lucky enough to have her in the workshops, and she made an impressive amount of very fine girring’girring. Her young daughters also have her talent for jewellery: they took to lost wax instantly.

For this project, I became a workshop co-ordinator, project manager, and jeweller’s assistant. I have now become entrenched within a family of jewellers who share amongst us a common understanding of the significance of jewellery. We delight in the meditative process of gathering: seeds and shells, of sitting on the ground and making by hand, the rhythm of carving jeweller’s wax, of creating something that you can wear on the body, gift to a friend to wear, hang on a wall.

Working in the studio with the jewellers every day over several workshops, we became profoundly effected by the experience. We began to learn Yolngu words, to build up our Balanda mouths to learn the trickier Yolngu pronunciation for sounds that we don’t have in English. One day Marrnyula, an artist I’ve always connected with and who has adopted me as her ‘yapa’ (sister), gave me my Yolngu name: Dhonyin, the Javanese file snake, one of the three manifestations of the Rainbow Serpent within Yolngu culture. When we asked her why I was given this name, she said because I looked like a file snake: it was my hair, she said, yellow and brown, like the snake’s body, and with rainbow colours: this water snake creates rainbow patterns on the water as it moves through water lilies.

Symbol of creation, fertility, transformation. Dhonyin the Rainbow Serpent creates beauty, a rainbow, from water and leaves. For this exhibition, Marrnyula created a series of Dhonyin pendants: they symbolise this hugely significant creation spirit. Perhaps Marrnyula named me Dhonyin also because I created this project: to transform, to evolve, to elevate. But it is these jewellers who have the true creation magic: to create beauty and art. The Bulay(i) jewellers create beauty from twisted vines and tiny seed pods and shells. Dhonyin symbolises our transformation and the transformation of Yolngu jewellery: no longer confined to the art centre in Yirrkala, now ready to go out into the world and to transform us all.

Emily McCulloch Childs, October 2017

I would like to thank Melinda Young, who has been so invaluable as workshop teacher, curatorial advisor, and much more on this project, production assistant Jody Thompson, Will Stubbs, Merrkirrwuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Siena Stubbs, Edwina Circuitt, staff, board and artists of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka, the community of Yirrkala, the Mununggurr family, the Yunupingu family, all the Bulay(i) jewellers, and the Ministry for the Arts Indigenous Languages & Arts Program for supporting this project.

We Are Tiwi: The art and artists of Munupi Arts

We are the Tiwi. Tiwi is we the people. Tiwi is my people, we that lived for thousands of years on these beautiful islands. Tiwi is different to mainland Australian Aboriginals. The Tiwi culture is different: the language is different. My people, the Tiwi people, we belong to this place – the islands – Bathurst and Melville Island – all these islands belong to my people the Tiwi. 

Pedro Wonaeamirri, Tiwi Statement in Tiwi: art, history, culture [i]

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 underlie the Munupi Arts & Crafts Association. The art centre exemplifies what is unique about Tiwi life and culture: a distinct art style, a balance of male and female power and status, a variety of artistic skills: painting, weaving, craft, textile design, ceramics, sculpture, printmaking. The artists of Munupi are adept at all these forms of art.

Located in Pirlangimpi community on the large Melville Island, over the Aspley Straight from Darwin, Munupi Arts is now well into its third decade as a successful art centre. It has 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.
Foremost amongst these masters are elders Cornelia Tipuamantumeri and the late Justin Puruntatameri. I visited Munupi in 2012 to research the art centre as a curator, art historian and writer, and 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[ii], 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[iii]: indeed, he was the most respected ‘culture man’ on both the Tiwi Islands.[iv]
Puruntatameri was born at Kadipuwu, next to the miscalculated site where the British would build their short-lived fort.[v] His knowledge of the fort, which lasted from 1824-9, was extensive; he told me, during our visit there, of events and features not previously documented. Of a bakery, which I have not noted on any of the archaeological records[vi], of how the Tiwi believed the British were there for treasure, for gold, of his grandfather being shot in the knee by the British, the bullet wound healed by his people’s ‘bush medicine’[vii].  Together with Munupi staff we walked around the old fort and trenches, commenting on our amazement that the British would think trenches would be any use against the Tiwi spears (perhaps they were confusing the Tiwi with Maori?). He showed me the two tutini he had made, those famous sculpture headstones made in the final stage of the pukumani ceremony.

Previous scholars have noted the tutini made for a white woman’s grave at the fort; Puruntatameri told me his were for the doctor and officer, the famous Green and Gold, who had been killed by the Tiwi as retribution for the British capture of their warrior Tambu, an act of war[viii]. 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.’[ix]
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. Early scholars of this art described the immense symbolic detail involved, wherein every painted line and dot in a bark painting or sculpture denotes a symbolic hieroglyph[x]. This hidden symbolism continues in the contemporary art movement today: in paintings by Munupi foundational artists such Reppie Anne Papajua (Orsto), Thecla Bernadette Puruntatameri and Francesca Puruntatameri, the acclaimed, award-winning artists Susan Wanji Wanji and Nina Puruntatameri, middle-generation strong Tiwi culture women Carol Puruntatameri, Delores Tipuamantumirri, Fiona Puruntatameri and Paulina Puruntatameri, and the new generation artists Natalie Puantulura and Debbie Coombes.
It is significant that most of this exhibition’s artists are women; Munupi was founded in the 1980s as a women’s craft and printmaking centre, combined with the pottery established by Eddie Puruntatameri, first chairperson of Munupi. The pottery is continued by his son, the expert ceramicist Robert Puruntatameri.[xi] Munupi artists have experimented in a variety of painting mediums, including ochre, acrylic and gouache; nowadays most of their contemporary work is done in traditional ochre, that natural, wonderful, ceremonial paint. Ochre gives their work a strong sense of ceremonial tradition but also allows for contemporary developments and interpretations of classical themes. The pared-down black and white ochre, seen beautifully in the work of Nina Puruntatameri, Josephine Burak and Fiona Puruntatameri, highlights the graphic elements of their designs.
The subtle warmth of the often rare pink ochre is worked expertly by Cornelia Tipuamantumeri, a perfect contrast to her black ochre background. Her works produce an emotional response in the viewer; they convey a deep calmness, but also a depth of cultural knowledge, not simplistically understood. Perhaps their detailed dot and line design evolves from her background as a skilled weaver.
It is astounding the myriad ways Munupi artists can work with the three classic tones of red, black and yellow. Black and yellow are Pirlangimpi colours, their prized football team, Imalu, has its name from the tiger; these colours are theirs. The Kulama ceremony, one of the most significant ceremonies on the Islands, features with these colours as the theme of many of these works. Nina Puruntatameri’s paintings of this semi-secret-sacred ceremony are an example of expert contemporary rendering of this ceremony: they illustrate its significance in their impressive power and beauty, giving us a glimpse of hidden depths involved in long and extensive ritual and religious ceremony.
The works in this exhibition may have a commonality in their mythological underpinnings but display a surprising array of stylistic variation. Carol Puruntatameri’s works depict organic-like forms in an earthy gentle palette of rich deep yellows and light browns. A painting by Daphne Wonaemirri is striking in its geometrical patterning, a clever, classic hallmark of Tiwi design. Debbie Coombs’ whimsical works are a great example of Tiwi anthropological observation, depicting the travels of peoples in vehicles and boats, more modern day realities that have become Tiwi through marks in their design. Delores Tipuamantumirri, daughter of Cornelia, paints strongly traditional designs and also more abstracted developments.
In complete contrast are the linear design graphs of Fiona Puruntatameri, perhaps the painter in this exhibition who most recalls the notable genre of Tiwi textile art. Her balanced compositions in black and white are intricate and aesthetically pleasing. Josephine Burak shares this reduced palette and geometry but her works are more fluid; they contains joyous explosions of light, perhaps evoking the great expressions of Tiwi ceremonial dance.
Only one artist, Natalie Puantulura, works in a multi-coloured palette. Yet her paintings lose none of the Munupi focus on balance, composition, and graphic elements. The beauty of the environment on the densely forested Melville Island is recalled to me by the evocation of natural beauty as seen in the works of Sheila Puruntatameri, Paulina Puruntatameri and Marie Simplicia Tipuamantumirri.
Thecla Bernadette Puruntatameri’s work is completely different again: joyous energetic shapes surge upwards in a dance-like movement; their combined design recalls the famed Tiwi barbed spears yet represent fire which is vital for both hunting and regeneration of country.
Justin Puruntatameri passed away just several months after I visited and interviewed him. His passing has 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 I think he would have been most proud of this exhibition, another great addition to the magnificent cultural lexicon that is the artists of Munupi, and a proud continuation of their fundamental assertion of their identity: ‘We are Tiwi’.
Emily McCulloch Childs

The name of the late artist Justin Puruntatameri is used with his family’s permission. The author wishes to thank the staff and artists of Munupi Arts for their generosity and time.

 

[i] Pedro Wonaeamirri in Jennifer Isaacs, Tiwi: art, history, culture, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing, 2012, p.viii.

[ii]Justin Puruntatameri et al, Tiwi Plants and Animals: Aboriginal flora and Fauna knowledge from Bathurst and Melville Islands, Northern Australia, Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory and the Tiwi land Council, Darwin, NT, 2001.

[iii] Nicolas Rothwell, Old memories from a new master, The Australian, 4 November 2011.

[iv] Jennifer Isaacs, Justin Puruntatameri biography, Tiwi: art, history, culture, p. 273.

[v] ibid, p. 272.

[vi] Several archaeological digs have been carried out at Fort Dundas/Punata, with the support of the Tiwi Land Council, the most extensive being by Eleanor Crosby, 1975, and Clayton Fredericksen, 2002.

[vii] This may have been the young boy who was shot as noted in Fredericksen and others, Clayton Fredericksen, Caring for history: Tiwi and archaeological narratives of Fort Dundas/Punata, Melville Island, Australia, World Archaeology, Vol. 34(2), Routledge, 2002, p. 288-302.

[viii] The story of Tambu’s (Tambu Tipungwuti) capture and subsequent escape is detailed by Tiwi people themselves and features in most writing on the events at Fort Dundas/Punata. It was also described to me in detail by Puruntatameri, who showed me the geographic locations of Tambu’s escape: he swam over the Aspley Straight from Fort Dundas/Punata to one of two small islands (regardless of crocodiles and sharks). From there he rested a while before swimming across to the other island, then back around to Melville Island proper, where he travelled around the back of the British and gathered his people, at his place called Ranku, who then warned the Munupi people, and they all planned a stealth attack on the British. This was a carefully planned, stealth ambush. One of the British escaped and alerted the Fort. The British then descended with guns, so the Tiwi ran into the mangroves. The famous barbed Tiwi spears, some up to 16 feet long, are impossible to get out. The Tiwi shot their spears through the windows of the hospital, and then they speared the commissariat officer John Green and Doctor John Gold, who were, Puruntatameri said, walking from the Fort to have a shower. They speared the doctor in the back. I believe this was a strategic attack on the doctor, for the British then had no medical help to deal with malaria, scurvy and the like, became ill, and the fort was abandoned. Puruntatameri also told me the Tiwi wondered why the British decided to establish their fort where they did, as there was little fresh water.

[ix] Justin’s daughter Paulina Puruntatameri, known as Jedda, accompanied us on our visit to Fort Dundas/Punata. A strongly active preserver of her people’s culture, she is current Chairperson of Munupi, and working towards creating a cultural museum there, and on digital archiving and on the repatriation of Tiwi artefacts. When visiting Fort Dundas/Punata she wittily commented to me ‘The British believed in terra nullius, because Tiwi hid in the bushes, they couldn’t see us, so they thought there might be no one here.’ We then discussed how that situation must have quickly changed when the first of the barbed spears flew from the bush.

[x] See Charles Mountford’s classic work The Tiwi, their Art, Myth and Ceremony, Phoenix House, London, 1958, which documents the intricate symbolic detail of mythology, landscape, religion and law particularly in Tiwi bark paintings of the people of Melville Island.

[xi] Isaacs, p.260.

Fred Fowler ‘New Landscapes’: Catalogue Essay

Recently I was at an exhibition opening of art from the APY Lands, a vast, stunningly beautiful and largely unknown (to outsiders) area of Australia[1]. A region of big skies and open land, hidden rockholes filled with creation beings, occasional mountain ranges and desert oak forests, a land still alive and still sung. An Aṉaŋu[2] cultural leader[3] who had made a particularly moving speech during the opening spoke to me afterwards of the ecological catastrophes affecting his people’s lands. This was the first thing he spoke to me about, with a sense of great urgency and despair. To those not so familiar with the only true Australian art[4], this may have seemed just one aspect of the arts’ subject matter or of the exhibition itself. But it wasn’t: it was the central theme: underpinning all the complex law and religion, the colour and beauty and humour and creation stories. The man was reaching out to me as a writer and curator who could perhaps help educate the rest of Australia, and the world, about the battles against the areas of a death, spreading, a formidable disease. Its name? Buffel grass. Brought in on the hooves of cattle, it is devastating large regions of fragile, beautiful Australia.

Due to previous art research trips through The Lands, I knew first-hand the devastation brought about by introduced camels, feral cats, rabbits and other pests. The feral camels, over a million of them, kill everything: they strip leaves and bark from trees, effectively ring barking them. They die in the waterholes, the lifeblood of these areas, destroying the entire eco-system for everything from the little marsupials, like the ninu (bilby) and the little birds, right up to the malu (kangaroo) and kalaya (emu).

Aṉaŋu are ethno-botanists, they know complex connections of plants, animals, water and land; the ways in which birds and animals spread plant seeds. So when animals die, plants die. Everything dies. But the buffel grass: this was something new again. Traditional, highly developed Aṉaŋu land management techniques weren’t working. ‘You can’t burn it; it doesn’t burn.’ the leader said to me. It was destroying the native grasses, another major life source. His words stayed with me.

Speaking with him, I was reminded of a dear Aṉaŋu elder and artist I had the privilege to work with, the late Tjilpi R. Kankapankatja. He was a genius level ethno-botanist, whom scientists from ANU travelled to study with. He knew the names, medicinal and other properties of thousands of plants. He painted these, in paint on canvas, with love and joy. His works were delightfully, superficially naïve, but underlying their directness were decades of extensive complex botanical study and knowledge. He was an example of how art can encompass and communicate many seemingly disparate modes of knowledge.

The title of Fred Fowler’s exhibition, New Landscapes, is simple, but telling. Australia is one of the oldest continents on earth, with the oldest continuous cultures. But for the Europeans who arrived here in the eighteenth century, it was a strange and new land. For their descendants, it still is, in many ways. The land of Australia is written in our historical literature as being ‘strange’ ‘foreign’ ‘other’, most of it ‘desert’ ‘dry’ ‘arid’ ‘hot’ and uninhabitable. Its ‘remoteness’ is commented on: but it is ‘remote’ only depending on where you stand, where you come from. If you are Aṉaŋu, the APY Lands are in fact the centre of the universe; Melbourne and Sydney are remote, strange, foreign and often harsh and unforgiving places. This land has been demonized as much as its original inhabitants, in a way that is inescapably linked.

It took European-Australian artists over a hundred years to even begin to capture some of the reality of the Australian landscape, and to cease to see it through overtly European eyes. The landscapes of Heysen, Roberts and Streeton were groundbreaking in their evocation of the bush, its misty blue palette, or dry red earth under a blazing blue sky. Yet their work was of the heroic bushman; an Anglo-Celtic or Saxon male hero, against all odds, surviving in a harsh environment. Man sought to dominate and tame the bush, not to live with it (although Streeton, to his great credit, was an early environmentalist and protector of Australia’s old-growth forests).

It wasn’t until the Antipodean school that such a tranquil, and rather mistaken, telling of settlement and environment began to be challenged. Boyd, Nolan, Williams and Drysdale in particular broke with the conventions of Australian landscape painting and painted a more accurate reflection of the world around them. Boyd included Aboriginal women and their plights in his landscape in his pioneering 1950s ‘Half-Caste Bride’ series. Nolan explored the interior of Australia and revisited the heroic myth, and found that it wasn’t so heroic after all. Williams and Drysdale pushed the boundaries of landscape painting at the time, reflecting the often abstracted character of aspects of the Australian landscape; its angular trees and un-European palette, its rounded, often amorphous red rocks. They introduced black into their landscape palette, evoking the true contrast of the land and its forms, far from a perpetual gentile muted European softness.

Fowler’s approach, whilst this series, he says, cannot be understood as conventional landscape painting, reflects the changes that have occurred in our understanding of our environs and the past as non-Indigenous Australians since then. Fowler has, as he says ‘used the vessel of landscape painting to explore ideas about native and invasive species, both animal and human’. His work is subtle, didactic and articulate: the works are neither brutal expressions of a self-aware artists’ frustration with the present state of environmental destruction occurring in this country, nor harshly realistic depictions of racial oppression and the inequality between the colonisers and the subaltern; and yet, nor are they superficially pretty, decorative paintings of trees and bush. They are aesthetically intriguing paintings containing a subtle yet intellectual and empathetic message, with careful composition of colour and form. Strange shapes hover in a colour field, they are animalistic, but not always animals. Some recall collage, parts of skulls, crystals, buildings, trees, birds, ghosts, or abstracted tribal designs.

Despite his good length of time as an exhibiting artist, these new works continue to explore some of Fowler’s background in street art and graffiti; some of the raw, urgent shapes revisit Basquiat whose influence upon the world continues. Often painted in oil stick, occasionally shapes appear like watercolour; the artist’s methodology of his technique reflects his subject. A variety of surfaces are created, some multi-hued, some rough, others smooth. The collage-like shapes often appear either floating or behind the canvas, giving us hints of other worlds, of depths beyond our immediate perception.

The titles reflect the wide-range of Australian environments: ‘Fire Coral (Colonial Marine Organism)’, depicts the fragile, threatened seas, Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef with its vast coral systems, the colonial sea trades (fishing, pearling, whaling, trepanging) which brought with them the violent underside of Imperial trade: slavery, prostitution, disease, violence, colonial sea trades which developed into modern day incursions: dredging, mining, over-fishing, shipping, polluting.  And the seas as a modern day, unequal battleground over borders.

In creating this series, the artist had considered the work of several other artists working in the field of colonialism and identity. Paola Pivi’s work ‘One Love’, with its depiction of white animals in a colonial type landscape, shown at Queensland’s GOMA, ‘contains the resonance of eighteenth-century European paintings which depicted ‘exotic’ species from disparate geographies, brought to Europe via colonial trade routes for the entertainment of the wealthy. Pivi also underlines the connotations of ‘white’ identity and racist histories.’[5]
The late Yorta Yorta-Scottish artist Lin Onus, one of the most significant artists of his generation, also resonates with Fowler: his work exploring both issues of colonialism and Australian identity often used the symbolism of animals. Onus’ famous depiction of himself and his good mate, gallerist and artist Michael Eather, as ‘X and Ray’, a dingo and a stingray, are amongst the most positive depictions of the mateship across Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples made to date. But it is Onus’ famous ‘Fruit Bats’ that Fowler says has most influenced his current series directly. Defiant statements of anti-colonialism, these clusters of bats, their bodies painted in the rarrk Onus was given permission to use by Arnhem Land artists, take over the most suburban of all Australian signifiers, the Hills Hoist. In typical Onus fashion, the intellect of the artist drove him to conceive the installation using humour, wit and whimsy to catch the viewer off-guard and suspend their political defensive disbelief.[6]

Significantly, Fowler’s New Landscapes series has an engagement with these complex issues of colonialism, identity, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous interactions and issues, without feeling the need to do as so many non-Indigenous artists seem fit, to appropriate Aboriginal art, as a perhaps well-meaning but inadvertently offensive sort of homage. The works in this exhibition are painted in the artist’s own stylistic oeuvre, he has felt no need to cheat, by lifting designs used in paintings from the great artists from the Western Desert or other areas, to give us easy clues as to what they are about.
His landscape subjects comprise broad-ranging themes: ‘The Ecological Society of Australia’ ‘Merging of Diversification’ ‘A Brief History of Colonisation’ which evoke these questions of identity and concerns for the impact of colonising powers upon Indigenous people and lands.

Some works are more site-specific, the border of New South Wales and Queensland, a border which brings to my mind the towns of Moree and Boggabilla, as seen in the films of Ivan Sen, who explores the complexity of Indigenous and non-Indigenous identities, particularly amongst youth, and issues of racism. The Bournda Nature Reserve, a national park in New South Wales. And the most famous of all Australian natural landmarks, perhaps with the exception of Uluru or the Great Barrier Reef, one so familiar for its settler architecture that it is almost easy to forget that it is even a site of nature, Sydney Harbour.
Fowler’s new landscapes evoke all that is ancient and beautiful about this land, and simultaneously, subtly, that which is more recent, brutal and confronting. They are a much needed, thoughtful exploration of these issues of land, animals, plants and humans, adding much to the discussion of Australia’s past and its present condition.

 

Emily McCulloch Childs

Fred Fowler, ‘New Landscapes’, Backwoods Gallery, Melbourne, 20-29th June, 2014

 

[1] The APY Lands are the Aṉaŋu (human being, person) Pitjantjatjara (language group) Yankunytjatjara (language group) lands, in northern South Australia. They comprise some 103,000 square kilometres; have 7 art centres, a wealth of brilliant artists practicing in many mediums from craft to painting, and a richness of unique and delicate flora and fauna.

[2] Aṉaŋu is the word for ‘human being, person’ in Pitjantjatjara, which is how these people identify themselves in the contemporary age.

[3] Cultural leader Lee Brady.

[4] Art critic Alan McCulloch used to say ‘the only true Australian art is that which is made by Aboriginal people’, and reflected this belief in his writings in Meanjin, The Herald and other publications.

[5] Paola Pivi, http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/past/2010/21st_Century/artists/paola_pivi

[6] Lin Onus, Fruit Bats, sculpture, 1991, held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, see George Alexander in Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004. Rarrk is the unique style of cross-hatching used by Arnhem Land artists, and is owned by them, which must not be used without permission. See also Margo Neale et al, Urban Dingo: the art and life of Lin Onus, 1948-1996, Queensland Art Gallery, 2000.

Exploring Colour

I have just returned from South Fremantle where I gave a lecture, opened an exhibition and gave a floortalk as part of Artitja Fine Art‘s exhibition ‘Exploring Colour‘ (view pics from the opening night on Facebook).

I also did an interview with Perth’s community radio station, the excellent RTR FM, which they put on their website as a podcast.

 

Below is my catalogue essay for the show. This is an extension of a lecture written by Susan McCulloch and myself, as part of our McCulloch & McCulloch lecture series on Indigenous art. It forms part of ongoing research into the many facets of Indigenous Australian art. Thank you to Susan for her contributions.

                            Colour in Aboriginal Art

‘Try to limit Warlpiri colours and you’re in trouble…look we’ve got these colours all around us everywhere…these are the colours of our world, you know.’ 
Paddy Japaljarri Stewart, senior artist, Yuendumu[i]
‘As the new school has established itself and the painters have refined and entrenched their techniques, the colours and their combinings have only gained in force. It has become more and more apparent that the pulse and sweep of the paintings are what bring the viewers in, and bring them nearer contact with the inner reaches of the traditional world.’ 
Nicolas Rothwell[ii]
Colour, as one of the main principles of art, holds a significant place within contemporary art in particular. Rothko was concerned with colour as a transcendental element, while Picasso devoted an entire three-year series to the colours blue and blue-green. Kandinsky, like the Symbolists, believed in the synaesthesic effect of colour and wrote about its relation to music. In his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art he “discussed the associative properties of specific colours and the analogies between certain hues and the sounds of musical instruments.” [iii]

Colour has, over the last 10 years, also become a huge factor in contemporary Aboriginal art. Early Papunya painters stuck to the ‘natural’ palette of ochre: browns, white, reds, oranges, yellows, black, and many still do today, although there is also often a flash of deep violet or an occasional ice blue and white palette in these artists’ work.

Ochre was the world’s first paint, and is central to Australia’s longest continuous tradition; the use and trade of ochre. Ochre sites are common throughout Australia. However, certain types are more valued than others in mythology. Classification of colour is not only a reflection of nature but according to traditional practice can represent social structures. In the Tiwi Islands the four moieties are all given a colour – red, black, white, and yellow.
In the desert, certain colours are associated with particular Dreaming stories. For example, in the myth of a creation bird ancestor, the seeds eaten may be black, yellow and so forth. This is represented in body paint, and again when painting that particular story on canvas. Colour is also associated with sites and ceremonies in which certain colours represent sites. Initiation is often concerned with red, white clay used for mourning ceremonies, and charcoal used in outline. As in the Tiwi Islands, different colours also ‘belong’ to different subsections or classifications – for example black and white for Emu dreaming people: Jampjinpa/Nampijinpa and Jangala/Nangala, and Yellow Snake dreaming of the Jakamarra/Nakamarra, Jupurrula/Napurrula subsections.

On a visit to Maningrida, the late Koori artist Lin Onus sensed a great deal of excitement amongst the artists over the discovery of new colours. In the 1980s, a green, hitherto unseen, had appeared in some works.’ My understanding in conversations with George Garrawun, who seemed to pioneer the use of green, was that green was a ‘nothing’ colour,’ said Onus. ‘Therefore he was able to experiment with imagery and concepts that would ordinarily fall outside his prescribed moiety (clan) entitlements.’ Les Midikuria and his colleagues at Gotjan Jiny Jirra (Cadell Outstation) showed even greater innovation with colours, including pinks, browns, greens and occasional mauves. Onus also asked Jack Wunuwun about the use of a brilliant orange which had not seen before. ‘He told me the colour was “airstrip” and mined from a small deposit of ochre at the southern end of the Maningrida tarmac.’ All pigments, however colourful, continue to be derived from the land. [iv]

But does the wild exuberant colour seen in more recent Aboriginal painting have the same amount of traditional significance or meaning as ochre? In the seminal book and exhibition of the same name, Art on a String: Aboriginal Threaded Objects from the Central Desert and Arnhem Land, curators and writers Louise Hamby and Diana Young analyse the colours used in Aboriginal jewellery. ‘Colour has an ability to change things.’ they write. ‘Bright colour makes things powerful and dynamic… fat from animals and use of ochres changes the skin colour of people. When applied to canvas or seed beads this is linked to the central concept of transformation in Aboriginal people’s religion. That ancestors could change ‘skins’ during their time walking the earth is indicative of their power. A series of colours therefore may relate to the same person or thing, or ancestor in a different time, place or incarnation.’[v]

The power of transformation, ability to change form and body shape is integral to the mythology of Aboriginal creation cultures. Donald Thomson noted the importance of red and shiny skin to mean power in Arnhem Land with the term marr. Wood is oiled and occasionally varnished to give lustre and reflection back to the viewer – a quality noted as significant to Aboriginal people from the top end and throughout desert regions by anthropologists for generations.

The great colourist painter Emily Kame Kngwarreye pushed the use of colour to extraordinary new dimensions in her luminous paintings of her home country of Utopia in glimmering shades of yellows, pinks, reds, greens, blues and deep purples. Her extraordinary ‘last series’, painted with a broad priming brush just two weeks before she died, reduced the canvas to vibrant, energetic minimalistic fluorescent strokes. Her use of colour brought about not just comparisons to the subtle play of colour and light in the work of Monet, but also to that of Abstract Expressionist artists such as Rothko and de Kooning. In part the comparison is not as far-fetched as it may seem; for these artists were influenced by Navajo sand paintings, and Kngwarreye came out of a long tradition of ceremonial ground as well as body painting. The vibrant purple, pink and yellow wildflowers of Utopia were crushed to add bursts of colour to the ochre palette of such ground paintings. Kngwarreye also held knowledge of a closely guarded pink ochre site, like Queenie McKenzie of Warmun who applied her canvases with her signature pink; she covered her tracks when gathering this pink ochre, so that it remained for her use alone. So the vibrant pinks, yellows and violets of the Utopia palette are therefore as ‘traditional’ as the earth tone palette of the ochre painters of Arnhem Land and the Kimberley.

The custom of priming the canvas with black also assists in giving canvases added depth and power of colour. In the APY Lands blue represents the colour of waterholes reflecting the sky and also Christianity, purple and pinks together are much admired colours – associated with sunsets and also wildflowers. Red, notes Hanby, demonstrates ancestral power, but may also express dangerous or unstable states – or one where change is imminent. Also bright red is attractive and seems to come forward spatially.[vi] Red is a hugely predominant colour in the work of the APY artists. Also the countryside and its myriad changes are reflected in art: greens appear in works often following periods of rain when the desert bursts into bloom. Additionally, the freedom afforded artists with the new variety of colour offered by acrylic paint is a positive thing that should be celebrated. All Aboriginal artists work with the aim of getting the best quality work produced: Arnhem Land painters continue to paint in ochre on bark, for the majority, because it still works the best for their needs. Their imagery and the fineness of the rarrk, for example, the cross-hatching technique made famous by artists such as Maningrida’s John Mawurndjul and those before him, works best using a fine stick or paintbrush, in ochre on bark. Working in acrylic on canvas just does not have the same impact. The same could be said for the Kimberley schools of painters, many of whom continue to dig, grind and paint with ochre, as their ancestors have done for thousands of years, which comes in a surprising variety of colour and tones. The colour and texture of the ochre pleases them in both its tactility and tonal qualities.

Yvonne Newry, Cattle Creek, 2012, ochre on canvas, 76 x 76 cm.

‘Colour is what sets apart the paintings of the past decade from the APY realm, and that realm is in truth a landscape of colour: the brick-red of the rocks at dawn, the bright green of desert oaks in storm season, the grey of tree trunks burned to ash by fire. The late-dawning acrylic era brought those blazing hues to canvas. It is hard not to trace the strong appeal, and immediate success, of the art of the APY lands to this distinctive feature, this “colour rhythm”. Nicolas Rothwell[vii]            

Janet Nyunmitji Forbes, Tjitji Kutjara, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 102 cm.

For the desert painters, particularly those from Yuendumu, Utopia, Papunya, and the APY Lands, the bright colours afforded by acrylic paint have given their artistic practice a joyous burst of life. They are able to render their landscape in evocative, emotional depictions of dreaming stories, titles deeds to country, song cycles, mythology and law, in a palette ranging from bright and sunny to moody and dark, through paint on canvas. Acrylic paint dries quickly, almost instantly in the desert sun, and artists are able to paint comfortably, sitting outside in small groups of friends and family, singing, gossiping, philosophising, remembering their childhood and parents and grandparents, of days gone by, time spent hunting and foraging for the sweet bush tucker, travelling through remarkable lands filled with tales of animal men and women, giants, spirits and other mystical beings.

Kukula McDonald captures the flash of yellow on her beloved totemic black cockatoos, the vibrant burst of orange and pink of a sunset over the MacDonell Ranges, the veridian green of Eucalypts, the cobalt blue of a Papunya sky.

Kukula McDonald, Looking for the Other One, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 91 x 61 cm.

The subtle purples, pinks, yellows and oranges, highlighted by white dotted outlines, snake across the canvas in meandering lines depicting the epic Two Sisters Travelling Story in the work of Elaine Lane Warnatjura, from Papulankutja.

Elaine Lane, Minyma Kutjara Tjukurpa: Two Sisters Travelling Story, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 121 x 60 cm.

Contemporary Papunya Tjupi artists embrace colours including mauves, pinks and cool apple greens, as seen in the work of Candy Nakamarra, and deep purples and blues, as seen in Martha Macdonald Napaltjarri’s work, as well as the earthy palette of their forebears.

Candy Nakamarra, Kalipinypa, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 71 cm.

Utopia artists continue the work of their predecessors, the great colourists Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Minnie Pwerle, by expressing their love for and knowledge of country in vibrant bursts of colour and rich, deep palettes. Minnie Pwerle’s granddaughter, Charmaine Pwerle, continues to paint her grandmother’s body paint designs in a rich and varied palette.

Minnie Pwerle, Awelye (Women’s Ceremony), acrylic on canvas, 105 x 90 cm.

Charmaine Pwerle, Awelye (Women’s Ceremony), 2012, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70 cm.

The artists from the APY Lands, such as Tjala Arts, in Amata, South Australia, have now become famous for their wonderful work with a closely aligned palette of red, orange and yellow, a particular favourite of the formidably prodigious Ken clan.

Nini Mervin, Ngayuku ngura – My Country, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 101 cm.

And one of the most significant, senior APY artists, Kunmanara Palpatja, depicts his sacred inherited Wanampi mythology in the most beautiful range of pinks, violets and yellows, comprising all the light and shade inherent in the tale, the beauty and violence of the creation stories indicated in every brushstroke loaded with colour. The work of the artists of Tjala is becoming increasingly colourful.

Aboriginal art is as much about re-birth as it is about continuing tradition: the adaptability of Aboriginal culture, along with the strength of its traditions, is the reason Aboriginal people have survived, when they were repeatedly pronounced doomed for extinction. Art is the most powerful reflection of human society that we have. The variety of the use of colour in Aboriginal art is an assertion of both their traditions and adaptability. The natural awareness these artists display as colourists of the highest level is becoming increasingly recognised. It is our great fortune that we have the opportunity to view the works of these artists; these great artists of colour.

 

[i] Paddy Japaljarri Stewart to Geraldine Tyson, assistant art co-ordinator, Warlukurlangu Artists, interview with Susan McCulloch, April 1996, in Susan McCulloch & Emily McCulloch Childs, McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: The complete guide, McCulloch & McCulloch, 2008.

[ii] Nicolas Rothwell, Painting the song of the land, The Australian, 29 October 2009.

[iii] Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky: A selection from The Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum and The Hilla von Rebay Foundation, AGNSW and touring, 1982, p.10.

[iv] Susan McCulloch & Emily McCulloch Childs, McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: The complete guide, McCulloch & McCulloch, 2008.

[v]  Louise Hamby and Diana Young, Art on a String: Aboriginal Threaded Objects from the Central Desert and Arnhem Land, Object – Australian Centre for Craft and Design Melbourne Museum and touring, 2001.

[vi] ibid.

[vii] Nicolas Rothwell, Painting the song of the land, The Australian, 29 October 2009.

© Emily McCulloch Childs & Susan McCulloch 2012