Susan Wirth: Diorama

It has been such a long time since I have updated this blog, mostly due to the rather hectic nature of this year, which has seen me get married and move country. Nonetheless, the time has come to add some new (old) things, starting with this piece that I wrote to accompany the solo exhibition Diorama by the Melbourne-based artist Susan Wirth. The exhibition was held at Gallerysmith in North Melbourne from 3-26 March 2011.




For nearly 100 years, Victorian school kids had pushed their noses against the glass and stared transfixed. There, just beyond the portal stood another world, a distant place, unfamiliar, but almost within reach. Behind the glass, a group of Yarra Yarra Aborigines stood frozen in time. Outside, Melbourne had boomed into a bustling metropolis, but here, in the silent confines of the museum, traditional Aboriginal lifestyle had stayed the same, undisturbed by the arrival of European colonists. When the display was first acquired, it had been the pride of the National Museum of Victoria. Commissioned by the Victorian government for the 1886 Colonial Exhibition in London, it was the very first diorama owned by the young institution.

In the 19th century, dioramas represented the height of a museum’s aspirations. For the National Museum of Victoria, the Yarra Yarra Aborigines diorama symbolised a particular moment of triumph; after three decades of financial and political struggle, the Museum had finally established itself as an integral part of Victorian society. Increased government funding meant that the institution could finally realise some of its grander aspirations, and the family of Yarra Yarra Aborigines was soon joined by a series of elaborate and expensive dioramas – lions on the savannah, polar bears in the arctic, kangaroos on the plains – all displayed in artfully illusory settings designed to transport the viewer to distant lands.

As a symbol of the 19th century museum, the diorama was, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, natural history as written by its victors. The diorama offered a frontier through which the entire world could, very literally, be laid out for European consumption. In the case of displays like the Yarra Yarra Aborigines, this presented a particularly insidious metaphor. Under the sway of orthogenetic theories of evolution, Aboriginal culture was seen as an earlier stage in the teleological progress of human civilization. Aboriginal culture was seen like an archaeological remnant of primeval man. Once contact was made with the more ‘advanced’ cultures, it was inevitable that this ‘primitive’ culture would disappear. Not only did this lead to an urgency on behalf of early anthropologists to record and collect ethnographic data for the information it could shed on the development of humanity, but it also made displays like the Yarra Yarra Aborigines diorama a melancholy snapshot of the end of the line for stone-age man.

If, a century later, things had not changed much for the family of Yarra Yarra Aborigines, by the 1980s, the modern world had begun to creep into the halls of the museum. Static displays gave way to interactive learning terminals, symptomatic of a new postmodern inclusiveness that posited history as open to multiple subject positions. History was repositioned as a mythopoetic process in which we were all participants; it was, as Greg Dening has argued, “metonymic of the present, metaphoric of the past; it presents – makes a now of the past, delivers the past in some dramatic display.”

The role of the new museum was not so much to show history, but to unveil the mechanisms of its performance – like a magician revealing his own tricks. The static diorama had no place in this new regime, unless used as an object for a knowing self-critique. And so, in 1980, the Yarra Yarra Aborigine diorama was dismantled, along with each of the other scenes. Once the pride of the museum’s displays, they were now relegated to storage, the quaint relics of a bygone era: ‘museum pieces’ of past museological practice.

It is, therefore, a curious decision by Melbourne-based contemporary artist Susan Wirth to title her latest series of works Diorama. The works are certainly not dioramas in any traditional sense. Rather, they consist of a delicate assemblage of lace, fabric and embroidery tacked flat onto board. From this artful arrangement shimmer the images of explorers in the landscape, recreating the etchings of the 19th century naturalist and ethnographer Wilhem von Blandowski (1822-1878).

Despite having the distinction of being the first employee of the National Museum of Victoria, Blandowski can hardly be considered a victor in the spoils of history. Due in small part to fate, and perhaps in large part to his obstreperous temperament, Blandowski’s achievements as one of Australia’s pioneering natural historians have, until recently, gone largely unnoticed. After committing an egregious error of taxonomic etiquette – naming two unsightly fish after distinguished gentlemen who felt slighted by the comparison – in 1859 Blandowski left Australia in disgrace, his grand scientific visions unrealised. After failing to find support for his natural history projects in Europe, Blandowksi abandoned science altogether, finishing his life as a portrait photographer in the Polish city of Gleiwitz.

While the mythology of Australian nationalism has often heralded the lone figure – the solitary explorer, lone bushman or heroic stockman – as a historical figure, Blandowski exists so far on the fringe, so ‘outside’ the establishment, that he was almost entirely forgotten by Australian history. His memory was erased almost without trace, discovered only in the scant echo of a few prints found in European museums. It is these images that are revived in Wirth’s latest series of works.

In some ways, Wirth is also an artistic outsider – not cantankerous like Blandowski, but certainly cut from a different mould to the average hip young Melbourne contemporary artist. Wirth came to art after an extended period of travel in Europe. Like many young Australians, she felt the need to leave Australia, to see the world and escape the wasteland of cultural cringe. And yet, like so many exiles, Wirth began with the perspective of distance to yearn for the place she had left behind. Rather than returning to one of the urban centres, Wirth relocated to Darwin. Even today, when expensive apartments crowd the coast and the skyline is abuzz with the storking cranes of development, Darwin remains very much a frontier settlement, a border-zone between European civilization and the vast heartland of the Australian wilderness. The town is a magnet for drifters and chancers; a place where two cultures are thrown together; where all human endeavours seem based upon improvisation; a bricolage town where impermanence is a permanent state of being. In this sense, we might say there is something uniquely ‘Darwinian’ in Wirth’s most recent body of work, where fragments of the past – lace, embroidery, fabric and quilts – are refashioned into something new, their patterns and rhythms reordered into a new image.

It is important here to make a distinction between Wirth’s ‘recycling’ of old materials and the ironic, postmodernist act of appropriation. Wirth’s use of fabric and lace – whether handed down from her mother and grandmother, or purchased in thrift shops – is less about the appropriation of pre-existing meanings than a wholesale systematic re-imagining. For Wirth, the usefulness of an object such as a piece of fine lacework is not in what it reveals about the past, but how it can be reused in the present. In the artist’s hand, the fragment can be cut, torn, dyed, twisted, reassembled and remade into something entirely different. Thus, Wirth’s grandmother’s quilt – an object seemingly rich in nostalgic possibilities – is transformed into the writhing umbilical chaos of Spillage 2011. It is an evocative transformation in which the quilt becomes its own biomorphic entity, part of a slithering alien landscape that belies little trace of its past.

It is tempting to extend a similar logic to Wirth’s two-dimensional works, such as her Diorama series or her images drawn from old family photographs, such as Stella 2010. This is precisely the reasoning used by Kate Just in her nuanced critique of Wirth’s 2005 exhibition She’s crafty... and she’s just my style held at West Space in Melbourne. Commenting on Wirth’s recreation of family photographs – in many instances containing relatives about whom Wirth knew little or nothing – Just argues that Wirth’s “subject is the disconnection from (or lack of) a defined personal culture. … [T]ime intensive processes like knitting, stitching or carving … allow the artist time to question, retrieve and rebuild a real or imagined history.”

And yet, it seems to me that there is a much more complex relationship between image and medium at play in Wirth’s work. One of the first things that most people notice when viewing these works is their virtuosity – how skilfully the artist is able to recreate a photographic image from an assemblage of found objects. From an abstract farrago of patterns, a clear, precise image shimmers into being. This creates a crisis of precession: what comes first, the image or the object? In some ways, the image feels almost like an afterthought, in other ways, like an act of elaborate trickery. The end effect is the sense that the image is always present, waiting to be teased out – or, put another way, that no object is without echoes of an image, the traces of which remain even if we do not know precisely how to read them.



What, then, is the meaning of Wirth’s appropriation of Blandowski? Even if Blandowski had not left Australia in disgrace, it is doubtful that his works would have ever entered into the nationalist canon, so far divorced are they from the dominant themes of the Australian mythos. Unlike the tragic figures of Burke and Wills, Blandowski’s vision of the Australian wilderness was not one of death and desolation, but rather, one of phenomenological grandeur and beauty. Take for instance his rapturous description of the scene that forms Wirth’s Diorama 2 (2010): “a massive wall of dolerite whose deep blue and sombre hues is in exquisite harmony with the dark green of the eucalypts.” Blandowski was equally quick to find merit in the knowledge of Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants, chiding the government for its maltreatment and failure to protect the country’s first inhabitants.

At the same time, Blandowski was not averse to performance and illusion in constructing the narrative of his images. In his etchings, he would often insert himself as a lone figure, dwarfed by the landscape, suggesting a moment of first sight. Wirth’s choice to appropriate these etchings, displayed like faded snapshots across board, draws attention to the very constructed nature of the imagery they contain. If Blandowkski was attempting to construct a vision of first sight, Wirth’s appropriation suggests that this first sight is always mediated, its representation simply the repetition of an imaginary moment. Like the museum diorama then, Wirth’s Dioramas are about illusion: the illusion of life, the illusion of presence, the illusion of history.

It is worth noting the strange visual affinity between Wirth’s Dioramas and the paintings of Fred Williams. Williams holds a unique position in Australian art history as the artist who most successfully married the lessons of Modernism with the Australian landscape. In other words, Williams took the specific (that is, the Australian landscape) and united it with the generic (international modernism, with its Greenbergian teleological progression towards the specificity of the medium). Following this logic, in his simple flecks of paint on the flat ground of the canvas – such as in his Yellow Landscape, 1968-1969, in the collection of Geelong Art Gallery – Williams was able to create a landscape that was simultaneously here and everywhere; a particular place and nowhere at all. If we continue this reasoning into Wirth’s work, then the tension between medium and image becomes about making something very specific (nostalgia, memory, family) into something generic (the illusory performance of the diorama).



But if the narratives of place, history, family, and so on, are nothing but a literal veil, then what is left? In the case of Williams’ paintings, it is the flat canvas – the very endpoint of Greenbergian modernism. In Wirth’s work, it something quite different: the flat sanded grain of commercial timber. The polished boards, with their faint memory of nature in the still-present rings of the tree trunk, become like the museum diorama, where nature is brought under human control, just as it is in the supposedly scientific natural history etchings of Blandowksi. The landscape – from the trees to the birds – becomes nothing but a pastiche, ready to be re-stitched and reordered, to be put to work of construction of history and mythology. This is Wirth’s dangerous idea. For if all history is simply a performance – a dioramic stage that can be either playful or serious – what is to become of the hierarchies upon which our established mythologies have been based? To return to Dening, it creates a history that does not believe in its own fictions: a history that does not attempt to replicate reality, but to redress reality. It would be very wrong to read this as melancholy in Wirth’s work, or to suggest her collages attest to the emptiness of signs. For there is a heroic pleasure in Wirth’s performance – a mythic figuring in which the diminutive figure of Stella Wirth might stand in for Heracles or Perseus. Wrought large on the stage of the canvas, in a sparkling brocade of jewels and lace, Stella is the hero of a new history written not by the victors, but by the performers: those ready, like Wirth, to take centre stage.

Bardayal 'Lofty' Nadjamerrek AO

Last week, I had the great pleasure of attending the opening of Bardayal 'Lofty' Nadjamerrek's retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. It is a truly extraordinary exhibition that confirmed my opinion that he was one of the greatest Australian artists of the last 50 years. Below is a piece that I wrote on Bardayal for the Nov/Dec edition of Art Guide Australia.




It is a strange feeling to be waiting for a giant. That is how I found myself, on a particularly hot afternoon in February 2006, as I watched passengers disembark from an aeroplane into the terminal at Tullamarine Airport. I had never met Bardayal Nadjamerrek, but I knew his artworks intimately. From the moment I first saw them, I was transfixed by their gravity and seriousness. Though I could not yet interpret what they were saying, I could recognise the terse eloquence and profound conviction with which they spoke. It was the paintings of Bardayal Nadjamerrek that awakened me to the beauty and relevance of Indigenous culture, and helped shape my appreciation and understanding of Aboriginal art. Such a personal tribute might seem small recognition for an artist of his standing, but it is a fitting salute to an artist and leader who spent much of his life striving to make people realise the value of Indigenous knowledge. Over the past four decades, he was a towering figure in Indigenous art and culture, more than living up to the epithet ‘Lofty’ that was foisted upon him as a young man working on the tin mines at Maranboy. Platitudes are hardly necessary; his legacy is assured.

As the stream of passengers slowed to a trickle, at last an old man was wheeled from the aeroplane. Sensing us approach, he pushed himself up from the chair, unfolding to his towering height. Waving his long spindly arms upwards, he gestured towards us, and in a rich husky voice, declared, “I’m Bardayal Nadjamerrek.”

Bardayal was born around 1926 at Kukkulumurr in the upper reaches of the Mann River region of Western Arnhem Land. His father, Yanjorluk, was from the Honey Dreaming Ankung Djang estate of the Mok Clan. His youth was spent traversing the Arnhem Land plateau with his family, developing a detailed knowledge of the stone country. During this time, he began his long artistic apprenticeship, watching his father and other men paint on the rocky outcrops and shelters. With the onset of World War II, Bardayal was indentured to service cutting timber for the war effort. Later in life, he worked as a miner, stockman, buffalo shooter and market gardener. Despite this, his connection to traditional culture remained strong, and he remained active in the ceremonial activities of the region.

In his later years, Bardayal would come to be respected as one of the most senior and important leaders in Western Arnhem Land. From the 1970s, he was instrumental in assisting Indigenous families to return to their traditional lands, helping to establish six different outstations. It was only in the mid-1990s that he was able to achieve his goal of returning to his own clan estate, by which stage government funding for outstations had ceased. Not to be deterred, Bardayal funded the creation of an outstation at Kubulwarnamyo himself. This tiny, makeshift community became like a bush university – a magnet for anthropologists, ecologists, linguists, botanists and art historians, all congregated around this grand sage of the Arnhem Land plateau. Bardayal was a true renaissance man, an encyclopaedia of knowledge on every subject of the stone country. Countless research projects and community programs poured from his tiny outstation, promoting Indigenous land management, heritage and culture.

In some ways, the magnitude of Bardayal’s cultural, social and environmental accomplishments has obscured his artistic achievements. In part due to the market fetish for ‘abstract’ Indigenous art, Bardayal’s work has often been consigned to the unfashionable margins of ‘ethnographic’ art. Even his strongest supporters have tended to focus on his close connection to the rock art heritage of Western Arnhem Land. But Bardayal Nadjamerrek was also a pioneering contemporary artist of the highest order.

Bardayal began painting professionally in 1969 at the Church Mission Society’s Oenpelli mission, under the encouragement of linguist Peter Carroll. Although aged in his mid-forties, he was already an accomplished painter, having many years experience in the rock-art galleries of the stone country. In this sense, Bardayal belonged to an ancient tradition, but it was far from a static tradition. On the rock faces, Bardayal was exposed to a palimpsest of styles, from recent images painted by his father and relatives through to much more ancient images attributed by the Kunwinjku people to ancestral ’mimih’ spirits. Bardayal’s paintings were not simply facsimiles of older works originally painted in rock shelters; his was a singular and extraordinary talent. Immediately recognisable, his work stands out from that of his peers in both its individuality and quality.

Bardayal Nadjamerrek was thus a renaissance man of Western Arnhem Land, at a time when the region as a whole was experiencing huge cultural transformation. In thinking about the idea of renaissance, it is worth comparing Bardayal’s achievements to an artist who might be thought of as his Italian counterpart: Giotto di Bondone. Like Bardayal Nadjamerrek, Giotto’s work was steeped in tradition – in his case, the extraordinary aesthetic accomplishments of the Byzantine Empire. Yet, through their individuality, both artists helped spark an artistic revolution. Like Giotto, Bardayal Nadjamerrek should be seen as a pioneering artist who paved the way for the radical developments that would follow him. Kenneth Clarke once said of Giotto, “Once we have learnt Giotto’s language, we can recognise him as one of the greatest masters of painted drama that has ever lived.” The same could be said for Bardayal Nadjamerrek.



Although his experience as a painter of rock art made him a proficient draughtsman, there are profound difference between rock art and art painted on bark, paper or canvas. Bardayal’s career shows him tackling this with increased sophistication. By the late 1980s, he had settled into a mature style both unmistakably unique and perfectly attuned to the dramatic possibilities of the canvas. He refined the visual language learnt from the rock art heritage, but over his career, Bardayal Nadjamerrek can be seen to experiment with iconographic elements for maximum artistic and allegorical effect. Take, for instance, one of his best-known images, Ngalyod – The Rainbow Serpent, a large mural of which hangs in the arrivals hall of the Darwin International Airport. Bardayal depicts Ngalyod as a combination of animals – the body of a snake, the head of a crocodile and the tail of a fish, with water lilies growing from its back. The importance of this amalgam is threefold. On the one hand, it pays reference to Ngalyod’s status as the ‘mother of all species’, but in another sense, it is about balancing the iconic with the transformative. In the Dreamtime, Ngalyod was said to assume a range of different forms, morphing from one into another.

The severity and gravity of Bardayal’s works mean that they are not as dynamic as some of his contemporaries or followers. In this sense, he is also like Giotto – in both artists, the weight of the figures gives them a heavy sense of static solemnity, so that Bardayal’s paintings can be seen almost like the icons of the Byzantine era. However, by picturing his images, such as Ngalyod, with a transformative potential (having all options included in the image at once), Bardayal’s works become less like frozen snapshots, and become something much more ethereal, as in his depictions of Yawk Yawk – the female water spirit. Just as in the Western myth of Mermaids, Yawk Yawk are believed to have legs while on land, and a fish’s tail when in the water. In Bardayal’s painting, however, the Yawk Yawk is shown having legs within her tail – or rather, having both legs and tail simultaneously. In doing so, Bardayal suggests the presence of multiple possibilities, while creating the dynamic tension of evoking the fleeting moment of transformation.



This visual inventiveness characterises Bardayal’s best works. He was a master of narrative painting, and his images have a searing, haunting intensity. Bardayal’s works gain potency from his sophisticated sense of form and ability to devise complex visual allegories. In the generation that followed Bardayal’s, many Kunwinku artists found a new allure by the introduction of shimmering cross-hatching. It was a path Bardayal refused to go down, claiming it was culturally inappropriate for him. He preferred to stick to the old-style single-line rarrk, like the old people did on the rock shelters. This distinguished him as one of a small group of elderly artists, that included his dear friend Dick Nguleingulei Murrumurru, Peter Nabarlambarl, Bob Namundja, and Kalarriya ‘Jimmy’ Namarnyilk. Of this pioneering school of artists, only the last-named survives.

The last time I saw Bardayal Nadjamerrek was in October 2008. He had retired from painting, but his final works were hanging in the exhibition Continuity: Culture, Country and Family at Mossenson Galleries in Melbourne, alongside those of his son Freddie Nadjamerrek, son-in-law Gabriel Maralngurra, and grandchildren Gavin Namarnyilk, Maath Maralngurra, Allan Nadjamerrek, Ray Nadjamerrek and Simone Nadjamerrek. The old man had not been expected to travel to Melbourne for the exhibition, but, against the instructions of his daughters, he had flown the coop to be with his grandsons at their exhibition. It was a powerful gesture, palpable at the opening, drawing tears from the normally stoic gallery director Diane Mossenson. On the night, Bardayal spoke of his own mortality:

I’m an old man now. Me no good. I might die soon. I don’t know yet. But I’ve lived good at Kabulwarnamyo – with lots of good balanda [whitefellas] and Bininj [Aboriginal people]. But no one was doing proper Bininj paintings … and that’s what they’re doing now – painting all my bim [paintings], all my stories, my grandchildren painting my way now.

In November 2009, I travelled to Gunbalanya for the state funeral of Bardayal Nadjamerrek. It was late in the build-up, and the air hung heavily, as though in sympathy to the sense of irreplaceable loss that hovered in the crowded Uniting church. After the funeral, over tea and biscuits at Injalak Arts and Craft, the art centre’s director Anthony Murphy pulled out a body of paintings by Bardayal’s grandchildren, destined for a forthcoming exhibition in Melbourne. In the year since his visit, the young men had grown in confidence and assurance. They had kept the single line of their grandfather, but slowly their individual identities were becoming apparent beneath his lofty shadow. In that moment, I was transported back to Melbourne in 2007. Sitting before one of his paintings – a beautiful, delicate figure on a red ground – Bardayal had sung the song of Karrarrkbarl – The Moonman. It was not one of Bardayal’s stories, but one that had been entrusted to him by a dying friend. At the end of each month, as the moon wains, Karrarrkbarl sings a mournful song because the moon is dying. At the beginning of the new cycle, as the moon reappears, he begins to sing a happy song to bring the moon back to life. But if Karrarrkbarl does not sing, the moon will not return. In the tentative paintings of Bardayal’s grandchildren, I heard the murmur of a familiar old tune. On bark, paper and canvas, Bardayal Nadjamerrek left an indelible song whose echoes will continue to brighten the cultural landscape for many years to come.

Bardayal 'Lofty' Nadjamerrek is on at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, from 10 December - 20 March 2011.

Col Jordan: A Play on White

I was only a small boy when I first visited St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. It was late in the afternoon when we arrived, and the fading winter light did little to break through the cold Byzantine depths of the cavernous basilica. Near the altar, a lone curate was busily engaged in preparing the evening service. Noticing us enter the transept, he gestured enthusiastically towards the heavens, before scurrying out of sight. All of a sudden, the building was lit up – the darkness expelled by the glittering brilliance of the basilica’s golden ceilings. Above our heads, Adam and Eve circled in an endless repetition of humanity’s Fall, while higher still, a bearded Heavenly Father separated the heavens from the earth, the land from the sea, and the darkness from the light. It was like a divine evocation of the curate’s act in switching on the electric lights. With our mouths agape, we became one with the million shimmering tesserae, subsumed into the vision unfolding above us – like each tile, we gave up our individuality to partake of the majestic unity of the divine order.
 
Col Jordan refers to his latest series of paintings as ‘The Mosaic Paintings’, but they are not mosaics in any traditional sense. Over the past four decades, Jordan has established himself as one of Australia’s foremost practitioners of hard-edge, optical abstraction, finding in it an unceasingly fertile ground for artistic experimentation and conceptual exploration. In his latest works, an overlapping selection of geometric shapes jostle for position across the white ground of the canvas, fragmented and unified by the interplay of different patterns. Jordan is a master of visual impact; high-keyed colours are offset against a ground of crisp white, giving the works an impressive bombast similar to the ceilings of St Mark’s.
 
However, Jordan is not a religious man, and his Mosaic Paintings must be seen in a very different conceptual light to those of his religious precursors. In the mosaics of St Mark’s, the individuality of each tessera is willingly conceded to the whole – a metaphor for the believer’s role in the divine hierarchy – but Jordan’s works have none of this spiritual certainty. In fact, throughout his entire career, Jordan has relentlessly explored the boundaries of paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty. In the dynamic tensions of the picture plane, Jordan draws attention to the entirely subjective nature of vision. His paintings are, in his own words, “celebrations of the infinite variability and unpredictability of the human condition”. This exploration of paradox has reached a new zenith in Jordan’s Mosaic Paintings.
 
In order to understand the height of this achievement, however, it is worth returning to a work he completed in 1968, Daedalus Series 6, which was exhibited in the landmark exhibition The Field and is now held in the National Gallery of Australia. In 1971, Bernard Smith praised the visual tension of the work, noting that “the tyranny of the frame as structural determinant is challenged increasingly the greater the distance from the edge, as forms and shapes arise which assert a kind of plastic freedom.” Arriving in the late 1960s, when Australian society was being reconfigured as a multicultural panoply, this conscious evocation of visual subjectivity seemed a perfect metaphor for the new, postmodern subject, which was constructed, as Chantal Mouffe has suggested, “at the point of intersection of a multiplicity of subject positions”. Indeed, in 1969, Jordan confirmed the suggestion, drawing a link between pictorial complexity and this changing sense of society and selfhood:
 
My paintings are about paradox. Visual embodiments of literal impossibility. A work is good to the extent that it reconciles irreconcilables. Daedalus is about directions, tied down and boxed by the stripes of its own identity.


In these stripe paintings of the 1960s and 70s, Jordan set up a tension between the unifying factor of the frame and the individuality of the coloured lines. In a sense, this is the exact opposite to the unifying of tesserae into a single image that occurs in traditional mosaics. And yet, both conceptually and visually, this strategy has its limitations. For Jordan’s paintings are not simply celebrations of unfettered individualism – rather, at their heart they recognise the need to create a “unified visual statement.” They should be seen as explorations of the delicate balance of individuality and community needed to create a democracy of vision.
 
In this sense, Jordan’s paintings must be considered as paintings of their time. For if, on first viewing, the Mosaic Paintings appear to present a cacophony of individual voices – each shape jostling for dominance – slowly, under Jordan’s skilful hand, they unite beautifully. The artist presents the cacophony of community: a dynamic harmony forged from many voices, as in musical counterpoint. Unlike the Daedalus series, where individuality was bound by the tyranny of the frame, in the Mosaic paintings the picture plane is burst open, threatening the unity of the image. However, under Jordan’s direction, a profuse joy emerges from this confusion. From the many unfettered voices comes a vision not of tyrannically bound unity, but of participatory community.
 
Jordan’s Mosaic Paintings are extraordinarily complex works, and they do not attempt to suggest that this sense of unity is easily achieved. In a world in which ethnic tensions and religious extremism threaten the stability of communities around the world, these paintings recognise the grand complexity of our epoch. Jordan’s paintings ask us to visualise the hardest paradox of all: how a seemingly chaotic jumble of individual entities can combine to make a world of poetry and beauty.

Col Jordan: A Play on White is on at Mossenson Galleries in Collingwood from 5-31 October 2010.

Vale Shane Pickett

This week I have been doing a bit of reading on Robert Dale's Panoramic View of King George's Sound, Part of the Colony of Swan River, which presents a colonial depiction of Nyoongar people around Albany. I've been wondering about how the Nyoongar people of Western Australia view this work. If he was still alive, I would have called Shane Pickett in an instant, and I am sure he would have spent a great deal of time discussing the various aspects of the work - giving generously of his knowledge, and taking pleasure in sharing it. This small instance served to remind me how much we all lost in his sudden passing in January last this year. Below is an extended version of a tribute that I wrote for the February edition of Art Monthly Australia.




Shane Pickett
19 February 1957 – 15 January 2010


I last saw Shane Pickett in the week before his death. Ever an industrious artist, he was busy putting the final touches on a series of delicate figurative landscape paintings intended for a solo exhibition in Melbourne. Spindly gum trees and gently undulating hills glowed with an outback haze against the white walls of his studio. In the past decade, Pickett had garnered widespread acclaim for his commanding abstract paintings, but few outside of Western Australia were aware that this was where his artistic journey first began. Flashing his famously impish smile, he quipped at the surprise that these works would elicit amidst the cosmopolitan Melbourne scene.

Although lauded as an abstractionist, Pickett never ceased to consider himself a landscape painter. In returning to figuration, he hoped to draw attention to the continuity of his concerns; to show the close connection his paintings maintained to his Nyoongar landscape. At the same time, he wanted to show just how much he had developed, to reveal the cultural, spiritual and artistic journey that underpinned his career. He titled the exhibition Djinong Djina Boodja – a Nyoongar phrase meaning ‘look at the land that I have travelled.’

It was a rare moment of retrospection from an artist whose career had been characterised by a restless forward trajectory of transformation and reinvention. After a career spanning three decades, Pickett had much to look back upon with pride. He had held at least 27 solo exhibitions and been involved in nearly 100 group shows. His works had travelled to America, Europe and Asia, and had been acquired by many of Australia’s most important collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

And yet, these were not the things that most interested Pickett. Although a proud man, he was never vainglorious and rarely spoke of his successes or achievements. When questioned, he preferred to speak on the cultural aspects of his art and career, measuring his journey not by accolades, but by his deepening knowledge of his Nyoongar heritage. For Pickett, art and life were united in an ever-expanding process of learning, in which spiritual and artistic developments were combined in a continually evolving process of creation.

A metaphor for this process can be seen in Pickett’s many representations of the moment of creation. This was the theme of his first important abstract work – Supernova 1988 – and it culminated in one of his best known paintings On the Horizon of the Dreaming Boodja 2005 (National Gallery of Australia). In the latter work [pictured above], delicate beams of light break through an abyss of white impasto, signifying “the birth of life, breaking through the warmth of eternity, bringing the beginning of the Dreaming Boodja, a place mankind calls earth.” In visualising this moment, when everything is born from the vacuum of nothingness, Pickett created a profound meditation on the nature of being. The viewer is held in suspense, literally stuck in the space between existence and non-existence, suspended forever on the horizon of being.

Pickett’s life and career presents a similar ontological conundrum. Like a supernova, he was an incredible creative source. Through his inspiration and influence he helped guide three decades of development and change in Indigenous art, culture and identity, particularly amongst the Nyoongar community of Western Australia. On the other hand, Pickett was very much a man of his time, with much of the resonance of his artwork and personal philosophy coming from their perfect articulation of the changing moods and attitudes of the world around him.

The son of Fred and Dorcas May Pickett, Shane Pickett was born in 1957 in the wheat-belt town of Quairading, about 170 kilometres east of Perth. Surrounded by athletic siblings but suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, Pickett gravitated to art from an early age. In 1988 he recalled, “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a pencil or brush in my hand.” The Nyoongar people had a strong artistic lineage, springing from the figurative landscape style that emerged from the Carrolup River Native Settlement in the 1940s. It was a style that Pickett quickly mastered, taking the intense colours of the Carrolup school and matching it with a rugged lyricism. After completing high-school, he moved to Perth, where in 1976 he held his first solo exhibition at the New Era Aboriginal Centre.

Much like the school of watercolour painting that evolved around Albert Namatjira and the Luthern Mission at Hermannsburg, the Carrolup style represented a very particular Indigenous response to colonialism. In an era in which assimilation remained official policy, these styles allowed a subtle communication of the significance of the Indigenous landscape, camouflaged within a palatably European medium. The spiritual and cultural underpinnings of these works remained largely unnoticed, and their subversion of Western perspective unrecognized.

By the early 1980s, as issues such as land rights and Indigenous self-determination began to gain momentum Pickett, like many Indigenous people, had begun to seek a more assertive vision of Indigenous identity. Taking the skills learnt as a landscape painter, he moved into the realm of magic realism. Again, a landmark work from the period concerned the moment of creation. Waagle – The Rainbow Serpent 1983 (Art Gallery of Western Australia), was a graphic, fantasy-style representation of the Rainbow Serpent in the act of creating the Nyoongar people. Swathed in atmospheric layers of paint, it was a lurid visualization of an epic story, and showed Pickett assertively extending himself beyond the picturesque boundaries of the Carrolup style.

Pickett’s confidence in his Nyoongar cultural identity was matched with an increasing visibility in the local community. Pickett moved in a circle of supportive and ambitious young Nyoongar men, which included playwright Richard Walley, actor Ernie Dingo and artist Lance Chadd, all of whom cite him as a source of wisdom, counsel and inspiration. In 1981 Pickett produced the sets for Jack Davis’ play Kullark – The Dreamers, and he volunteered his time to many Indigenous groups including the Aboriginal Planning Group, the WA Aboriginal Artists Advisory Council and the Australia Council’s Visual Arts and Craft Committee for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts. It was around this stage that Pickett’s career began to flourish. In 1986 he was awarded the Museum and Art Galleries Award at the Third National Aboriginal Art Awards and in 1988 he was declared WA Aboriginal Artist of the Year.

While his landscape and magic realist tableaus brought him great respect and admiration in Western Australia, it was his move to abstraction in the late 1990s that saw Pickett‘s recognition as an artist of truly national standing. This coincided with a long association with gallerist Diane Mossenson of Indigenart, Mossenson Galleries. At Mossenson Galleries, Pickett found the stability and encouragement to experiment, developing a unique personal style of gestural abstraction. His decade-long association with Indigenart was the most productive and successful era of his career, and saw him included in numerous important exhibitions including South West Central (Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2003) and Culture Warriors: The National Indigenous Art Triennial (National Gallery of Australia, 2007). In 2006 he was granted a retrospective at the Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts. In the same year he won the Sunshine Coast Art Award and the Joondalup Invitation Art Award, and in 2007 he was awarded the $40,000 first prize in the inaugural Drawing Together Art Award.

Pickett’s move to abstraction was driven by a desire to find deeper, more intuitive spiritual meanings in the landscape. According to Nick Tapper, “Pickett came to feel that representation of the skin and hair of the environment – its landforms, flora and fauna – missed the resonant undercurrents flowing amongst these elements.” As he matured, and his cultural knowledge increased, Pickett increasingly felt that traditional representations were incapable of expressing his deeper understanding of the landscape.

With this knowledge, he realised, came a greater responsibility. This was something that Pickett felt strongly about – both in respecting his elders and passing his knowledge to a younger generation of Nyoongar people. Shortly before his death, he confided that his proudest achievement was his participation in the monumental Ngallak Koort Boodja (Our Heartland) canvas produced on behalf of the Nyoongar elders for the 2006 Perth International Arts Festival. Pickett took great pride and pleasure in the extensive consultation with both the community and elders of the Nyoongar nations that occurred before commencing work on the monumental piece. He saw the project as being an important galvanising moment in the Nyoongar community, and felt that it was imperative that it correctly reflected the teachings and values of his elders.

Between 1980 and 1983, Pickett completed a Diploma in Fine Arts at the Claremont School of Fine Arts in Western Australia. Although he valued the technical skills he had learnt there, Pickett often lamented the lack of Indigenous teachers. He sought to redress this imbalance, offering his services in numerous community workshops, primary and secondary colleges, along with teaching Aboriginal prisoners at Canningvale Prison. An important role model in his community, he dedicated considerable time to assisting with troubled or disaffected youth, guiding them quietly and calmly with his gently spoken cultural teachings.

Pickett was also influential for young Nyoongar painters. Between 1996 and 2003, he worked as a lecturer at TAFE in Midland and Bunbury, helping to develop the Diploma of Aboriginal Visual Arts course. Pickett’s influence and stewardship led to the widespread adoption of his style amongst a younger generation of artists. The success of his abstractions inaugurated a new school of Nyoongar painting whose influence can be seen in the work of many young artists, including Ben Pushman and Troy Bennell.

At its heart, Pickett’s move to abstraction had a cross-cultural mission. From his earliest works, he saw himself as an ambassador for Nyoongar culture. Although a softly spoken, quiet advocate, Pickett was unwavering in his championing of Nyoongar cultural values. Generous with both his time and knowledge, he was a popular speaker, as healways willing to patiently explained the complex philosophical minutiae of Nyoongar teachings.

Pickett’s abstract paintings communicate these teachings intuitively to an uninitiated audience. According to Pickett, “A lot of them don’t know what they are seeing, but often they’ll have an idea. When they do know what the story is about, they get drawn in.” For Pickett, abstraction was a method for leading people to their own personal communication with the Dreaming, and through this, to a respect and understanding of Indigenous values. Perhaps this explains the popular appeal of Pickett’s work, for like Pickett, they were never judgemental, but softly guided the viewer into a dialogue with the magical world of the Dreaming. In 2007, he noted, “The Dreams do run strongly through the views of my life.” This is perhaps his lasting legacy; in Pickett’s Dreaming we find a dialogue that crosses all cultural barriers, uniting all people within his a powerful cosmology of reconciliation.

Shane Pickett died on Friday 15 January 2010 following a sudden bout of illness. He is survived by his wife Violet, his sons Roger and Trevor, and his five grandchildren.

A Contemporary Spirit: The Art of Graham Badari

A pair of red eyes glowers from an angular, skeletal visage. Its snarling grimace revels sharp teeth, its razor-like claws borne forth ready to strike. This is one of the unseen dangers of the bush: Namarnde, the malevolent spirit of the box pandanus. When pregnant, Kunwinjku women avoid walking too close to pandanus bushes, in case Namarnde captures the spirit of their unborn babes. In Graham Badari’s painting, this terror is brilliantly evoked through a combination of jagged ferocity and delicate cross-hatching or rarrk. His painting transports the viewer to the mystical landscape of the stone country, where spirits inhabit every crevice and ancient paintings adorn the rock-faces. At the same time, Badari’s Namarnde is uncannily futuristic, bearing a striking resemblance to the cyborg Maria from Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi epic Metropolis.



Graham Badari was born in 1963 at Gunbalanya (Oenpelli) in Western Arnhem Land. His country is Maburrinj, near Kudjekbinj, about 120 kilometers east of Gunbalanya. He was raised by the renowned artist Djawida Nadjongorle, but like many of the artist at Gunbalanya, credits the late Thompson Yulidjirri as his greatest artistic influence. From these senior men, Badari learnt the fluid and dynamic style that defines Kunwinjku painting at Injalak Arts. He began painting sporadically around 1990, but in recent years, his career has gained a new focus and momentum. Following the recent passing of many of the senior artists at Gunbalanya, Badari has become one of the leaders of a small coterie of dedicated artists, which includes Wilfred Nawirridj, Glenn Namundja, Gabriel Maralngurra, and Gershom Garlngarr. They are a ubiquitous presence at Injalak Arts, and are fiercely proud of their art, community and art centre. Their paintings show a faithful dedication to the visual language of their rock-art heritage, while remaining committed to artistic innovation. It is this beguiling balance of tensions – innovation and tradition, ancient and modern, beauty and terror – that energises Badari’s paintings. And yet, to understand how his work could so effortlessly embody these apparent dualities, it is necessary to understand how these competing positions coexist within Badari’s worldview, informing his unique and eccentric personality.



With his impish smile and cheeky sense of humour, Grahama Badari or ‘Grammy’ as he affectionately known, is the gentlest of souls. He is a popular figure at the art centre, a beloved tour guide and font of community news. And yet, as his paintings suggest, Badari has a fascination with the darker side of life. Walking in the bush, he is careful to warn of the dangers of Namarnde or other malicious spirits such as Namarrodoh. Always concerned with the safety of his guests, he cautions of the equal dangers posed by the very present Kinga (salt-water crocodile) and the more otherworldly Ngalyod (Rainbow Serpent). Badari believes wholeheartedly in the presence of these spirit beings; they are an intrinsic part of the cultural heritage that has informed his life.



On the other hand, Badari is sensitively attuned to the modern world. The ease with which he traverses this cosmology of the mystical and the everyday might go some way to explaining his attraction to western science-fiction and fantasy imagery. This passion is not only evident in Badari’s paintings, but in his distinctive choice of fashion, which favours the kind of lurid fantasy t-shirts more commonly seen on teenage heavy metal fans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Badari is also a keen follower of heavy metal music, with his favourite band being the Swedish group Hammer Fall. Indeed, it is worth comparing Badari’s depictions of Namarnde and Namarrodoh with the red-eyed, hammer-wielding leviathan featured on the group’s album covers, designed by renowned graphic artist Samwise Didier. That said, when questioned on these striking visual parallels, Badari is quick to refute such influences, preferring to highlight the traditional aspects of his work. To Badari, these are ancient stories that he holds in the deepest respect, and he rejects the suggestion that he might be trifling with them by bringing in profane external influences.



And yet, it is this disavowal that reveals the very essence of Badari’s paintings. For in suggesting that his works are a ‘fusion’ of the traditional and the contemporary, it is vital to note that this is not some sort of wry pastiche of ironic allusions and winking ironies. Badari’s work contains none of this post-modern disingenuousness; he is an artist of deep, abiding integrity. The meticulous care that he takes with his work, with its fine attention to detail and delicate rarrk, is a reflection of the reverence with which he holds both stories that he paints and visual tradition they embody. Badari’s paintings are heartfelt depictions of his cultural heritage, and he paints them with all his being, striving to make them as vivid, striking and beautiful as he knows how. If they are a fusion of old and new, it is because Badari’s worldview completely, comfortably and intuitively traverses both Indigenous and western episteme. His paintings are reflections on a living culture – one that encompasses both ancient tribal songs and heavy metal riffs. Like all great artists, Badari captures the spirit of his time, and through his unique artistry, brings tradition forward into a dynamic contemporary vision.

This piece was written to accompany Graham Badari's first solo exhibition, held at Mossenson Galleries Perth, 16 March-25 April 2010. Portrait photograph of Graham by Lydia Lange.

Geographic Cosmology: The Art of Lucy Ward

Below is an extended text of the article, "Geographic Cosmology: The Art of Lucy Ward" published in Craft Arts International, no.78, 2010, pp.34-39

It is June 2005 and a heavy thunderstorm has just erupted, pouring noisy torrents of rain upon the tin roof of Mossenson Galleries in Perth, Western Australia. Entering the gallery, octogenarian Kimberley artist Lucy Ward wears a beaming smile as she shakes the rain from her snow-white hair. Approaching a large brown canvas covered in a dozen or more images of her ancestral Wandjina spirits, she runs her hand across the painting, as though affectionately stroking a long lost friend. “My Wandjina,” she exclaims. “You’ve brought the rain!”

Like Ward, these Wandjina are a long way from their Kimberley homelands. And yet, this distance does not weaken their spiritual or elemental power. For the Ngarinyin, Worrorra and Wunambal people of the north-west Kimberley, the Wandjina are the central figure of religious significance. According to legend, they were the physical manifestation of great spirit beings who controlled the elements, such as wind, lightning and rain. During the Ngarrangarni or Dreaming, their actions and adventures shaped the landscape and helped create Indigenous law. At the end of creation time, they left their images on the rock faces and escarpments, in order to watch over the country and its Indigenous inhabitants, and to ensure the continuity of traditional law. Over milenia, the repainting of the Wandjina has become a sacred act of passage, connecting the Ngarinyin, Worrorra and Wunambal people in an unbroken link with both their ancestors and the Ngarrangarni.

The power of this ancestral connection, and indeed, the power ascribed to the imagery of the Wandjina, reflects the unique spiritual temporality of the Ngarrangarni or Dreaming. As W.E.H. Stanner notes, although the concept of the Dreaming evokes a heroic time when ancestral spirits roamed the earth, “one cannot ‘fix’ the Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen … a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal men.” The essence of Ngarrangarni runs through all things and connects every point in time and space. Adherence to its fundamental and mystical truths is the driving force for senior Indigenous people like Ward, shaping their lives and world-view. It is this essence that explains the power ascribed to the image of the Wandjina. This is not only a spiritual and elemental power – such as the power to bring on rain in Perth, hundreds of miles from their ancestral homelands – but also their power as profound visual statements that challenge our western preconceptions of time, space, aesthetics and value.

Lucy Ward began painting in 2003 and has since established herself as one of the leading contemporary painters of the Wandjina. She has exhibited throughout Australia, as well as in Asia, Europe and America, and has held eight solo exhibitions through Mossenson Galleries in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. Her works are held in several important public collections, including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Western Australian Museum, the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia and Macquarie University. In 2006 she was awarded the City of Stirling Art Award, and she has been a finalist in numerous major art prizes, including the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, the Wynne Prize, the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, The Alice Prize and the Waterhouse Natural History Prize.

In the jubilant glow of Ward’s paintings there is a reflection on her long life lived in the Kimberley. She was born around 1920 at Ngarangarri country – the land of the Honey Dream – in what is now known as Beverley Springs Station. Her mother died while Ward was still an infant, so her father carried her around the bush in a bark coolamon, before finding a woman who was breastfeeding a little boy. According to Ward, “That little boy and I went share for her ngaman (milk), She was a good woman. That is why I am still alive today.”

Ward’s childhood was spent traversing the Ngarangarri and Winyiduwa clan estates with her father and grandfather. From these old men, she gained first-hand knowledge of the hunter-gather lifestyle: hunting kangaroo, emu, fish and prawns and gathering yam and edible water lilies. They also introduced her to the ancient artistic practices of the Ngarinyin, and she recalls fondly watching them paint “the really Wandjina in the caves.” As she matured, Ward worked on the burgeoning Kimberley cattle stations, both as a domestic servant and well as mustering and tailing cattle. But the formative experiences of her childhood remained with her, and during the wet season, when monsoonal rains locked the cattle industry down, Ward and her Ngarinyin kin would return to their ancestral estates for ceremony and to tend to their country.

Like her life, Ward’s paintings are a balance of sorrow and joy. In many of her canvases, a single Wandjina is painted in isolation, surrounded by swathes of colourful dotted squares, signifying the ‘sugarbag’ or bush-honey pod. According to Ward, in the Ngarrangarni, this Wandjina broke with traditional law, and took another man’s promised wife. This angered the man’s family, who pursued him across the country, seeking to punish him for this indiscretion. They finally caught him in Ngarangarri country, where he was beaten, speared and killed. From his prostrate body rose the sugarbag trees, making Ngarangarri country the land of honey. It is a powerful story of the connection of all things. In death there is creation; in punishment there is redemption; in the bitterness of tears, the sweetness of honey.

This sense of connectivity can be seen even more clearly in Lucy Ward’s signature image of ngara (the sugarbag). Ngara refers to the honey made by the stingless native bees. There are two types of bees native to the north-west Kimberley, the tree-dwelling bee (Waningga) and those that build their hives in rocks (Namri). Ngara is an important totem for Lucy Ward – not only was she born in Ngarangarri (the land of the Honey Dream), but according to Ward, she was also born under the shade of a sugarbag tree. Along with the image of the Wandjina, the sugarbag has been one of Ward’s defining motifs. However, whilst Ward’s depictions of Wandjina have remained relatively unchanging – undoubtedly due to the sacred nature of the image – the sugarbag has provided her with a motif of incredible flexibility. Over her diverse artistic career, it has been an endlessly malleable aesthetic form, in which she has found a seemingly boundless array of conceptual and aesthetic variations. Ward’s gallery representative, Dr Diane Mossenson, notes with amazement Ward’s “capacity for artistic re-invention. Unlike many Aboriginal artists who paint a limited number of images, Lucy has remained strong to her stories, but she continually recreates the imagery, finding new ways to express her stories.”

During his fieldwork in the Kimberley in the early 1960s, anthropologist Ian Crawford noted several rock-art sites in which the sugarbag motif was prominent. Reproduced in his landmark 1968 volume Art of the Wandjina, the cave paintings of sugarbags are clear artistic precursors to Ward’s early paintings. Like her Wandjina, this comparison reveals how much Ward’s work takes its core inspiration from her rock-art heritage. This etymology is easily overlooked in Ward’s work, particularly in light of the explosive acrylic palette favoured in her early paintings.

Like the cave paintings of sugarbags, Ward’s earliest depictions show the sugarbag motif as distinct, individual objects. Each honey pod is depicted as an irregular square or circle filled with coloured dots. Sometimes these squares or circles are sub-divided, while in other cases they are not. In late 2005, however, a major development began to occur in Ward’s portrayal of sugarbags. The sugarbag became an increasingly open signifier, whose individual unity slowly disappeared. In her most recent works, such as the monumental diptych Ngara (Sugarbag) Story 2008, exhibited at the Arthur Guy Memorial Art Prize, any sense of this indivisible unity has been shattered in favour of an all-over dotting that covers the canvas in a pulsating invocation of the aerial landscape.

There are many probable reasons for this development. One reason is certainly Ward’s exposure to artworks outside her immediate cultural experience. In 2006, Ward visited Melbourne for the launch of her exhibition Ngarrangarni Manambarra. During her visit, she attended the National Gallery of Victoria, where she was given a guided tour by senior curator Judith Ryan. Ward was particularly taken with both the style and scale of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri’s monumental Napperby Death Spirit Dreaming 1980. Following the visit, she repeatedly expressed her desire to work on larger canvases, referring back to the Tjapaltjarri’s canvas as an example. In the proceeding months, Ward not only completed several larger canvases, including the majestic 2007 Wandjinas in Ngarangarri Country (198 x 298 cm) which was exhibited in the 2008 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, but Ward began to cover much larger sections of her canvas in shimmering dot-work, creating constellation like backgrounds to her tableaus of Wandjina, sugarbags and country.

On a more local level, 2005 also saw the arrival of another profound artistic influence on Ward’s work. In that year, the senior Nyikina artist Loongkoonan began painting at the same Derby based workshop as Ward. Although belonging to a different language group, Ward and Loongkoonan began a highly competitive and influential artistic relationship. Painting alongside each other, they became like a Braque and Picasso of the Kimberley – taking on the visual lessons of each other’s work, and continually challenging each other to find new ways of developing their very different painterly practices.

Despite these external prompts, however, Ward’s development has shown a clear and uniquely personal epistemic trajectory. In the paintings of Lucy Ward, each mark upon the canvas is like a fingerprint, betraying the trace of its creator’s movement. In painting her ancestral homelands, her marks revel her ownership of the country, like footprints in a landscape that she has traversed by foot, understood instinctively and known intimately. But just like a footprint, they exist as the memory of presence, a nostalgic echo of past travels.

In the wake of colonial incursion, elders like Ward cannot live on their traditional lands, but return only occasionally to tend to the country of which they are the sacred custodians. Returning to her sacred sites, Ward sings out to the spirits, warning them of her arrival. Her song echoes through the stony ridges and it is as though she is a young woman again. It is this memory of the landscape that reveals itself in Ward’s paintings. Each mark connects Ward to her landscape, making her one with the Dreams, songs and topography of her land of honey.

In this context, the sugarbag is a profound tripartite symbol for the personal (as Ward’s totem), the physical (the bush honey pod) and the spatial (Ngarangarri country: the land of the sugarbag dream). In shattering the individual unity of the sugarbag – literally opening it up – Ward fuses these three categories. Rather than fingerprints, the dots meld into a pointillist landscape that shimmers into being with a cosmological unity.

These seemingly abstract shapes thus become a complex metaphor for the inter-relationship of identity, culture and country. They are part of a sacred and personal geography that Marcia Langton has termed ‘placedness.’ For Ward, the past is not, as L.P. Hartley has famously suggested, ‘a foreign country’, but rather a familiar country that situates and unites all moments in time. Ward’s paintings become what Langton has described as “site markers of the remembering process and of identity itself.” They inhabit a temporality that is neither past, present nor future, but part of the sacred link that connects Lucy Ward to the timeless Ngarrangarni.

Mina Mina Jukurrpa: Kelly Napanangka Michaels & Alma Nangala Robertson

Far to the west of the remote Indigenous community of Yuendumu, in the distant reaches of the Tanami Desert, lies one of the most important ceremonial sites for the women of the Warlpiri. Mina Mina is a sacred landscape made up of two large clay-pans guarded by a feathery sentinel of desert oaks, where, in the Jukurrpa (Dreamtime) a series of karlangu (digging sticks) emerged from the ground. Taking up these sticks, a large group of ancestral women began a heroic journey north to Jayinki and then eastward through Alcoota country. Marching in joyous exultation, their paths shaped the landscape, permeating it with the spirit of their songs. According to the Warlpiri, the spindly desert oaks at Mina Mina are an embodiment of these first digging sticks and of the ancestral women who brandished them.

The story of Mina Mina is of profound spiritual sustenance to the Warlpiri. It helps explain the genesis of the landscape, and circumscribes their relationship to it. Despite being over 300 kilometres from Yuendumu, it remains an important site of ceremonial and custodial obligations. Not surprisingly, it has also been one of the great sources of artistic inspiration for Warlpiri women. At the hands of Yuendumu’s great chroniclers it has revealed itself in a myriad of ways; some artists have chosen to focus on the desert oaks (Kurrkara), others the hair-string skirts (Majarrdi)worn during ceremony, others still have focussed on the edible fungus (Jinti-parnta) or vine (Ngalyipi) first collected by the ancestral travellers. Combined, these stories create a stunning vision of place, united by the indelible spiritual identification that is felt by the Warlpiri, and in particular those of the Napangardi/Japangardi and Napanangka/Japanangka sub-sections, for whom this place resonates with personal significance.

In contrast to the other early epicentres of desert painting, such as Papunya and Lajamanu, the painting movement at Yuendumu did not coalesce around senior men, but began in 1983 through the efforts of a group of senior Warlpiri women. Encouraged by the anthropologist Françoise Dussart, the women helped forge the dynamic ’Yuendumu style’, which, as Judith Ryan has noted, was “characterised by vibrant colour, large brush-strokes and an almost messy, gestural freedom.” In 1985, the artists formed Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation, through which they have refined the style, adding a level of accomplishment and elegance, while retaining the intensity of colour and spontaneity of design that defined the early movement. Subsequent generations of Yuendumu women have gained international acclaim as artists, including Maggie and Judy Napangardi Watson, Bessie Nakamarra Sims and Betsy Napangardi Lewis. Despite generational change and aesthetic transformation, the presence of Mina Mina in Warlpiri art has remained an iconic constant.

It is this legacy that is taken up in the paintings of Kelly Napanangka Michaels and Alma Nangala Robertson. Born in the late 1960s, Michaels (b.1965) and Robertson (b.1969) heard the Jukurrpa stories from their elders, and saw them painted with passion and dedication by their artistic forebears. Now, they pass these stories onto their children and grandchildren, retelling them in a kaleidoscopic explosion of colour. The influence of their elders runs through their work; the dominant iconographies of Warlpiri painting are clearly present, as is the characteristic Yuendumu palette of pinks, mauves, purples and blues. However,this is not a slavish form of imitation. In the paintings of Michaels and Robertson, influence exists as an aesthetic undercurrent that bubbles to the surface like the spiritual residue of the ancestors that informs the landscape. The influence of their artistic precursors becomes a song that infuses the canvas, filling it with the authority of cultural continuity and uniting it with the performative actions of song and ceremony that connect the Warlpiri to the Jukurrpa.



In Michaels’ depictions of Mina Mina, two key elements of the story dominate: the ceremonial dancing skirts (Majarrdi) and the edible fungus (Jinti-parnta) collected by the women on their journey. Majarrdi and Jinti-parnta are painted with a jutting angular intensity, which makes them appear to quiver across the canvas. Using extremes of contrasting colours (including a distinctive use of black and white outlines), Michaels creates a fluttering tension between foreground and background that makes the Majarrdi appear to float above the canvas as though suspended by invisible dancers. This creates an ethereal sense of spiritual presence, while the thickly painted ground of the canvas anchors them to the temporal materiality of the landscape.

Like her artistic precursors, Maggie and Judy Napangardi Watson, Robertson’s focus is the sacred Ngalyipi vine and the desert oaks (Kurrkara). Her paintings are swirling evocations of the landscape that shuttle between the narrative of travel and the fixed nature of place. Meandering lines sink into the landscape, evoking the residue of ancestral travels that simmer below the surface. Mina Mina pulsates in a spiral of colour that alludes to the constant spiritual undercurrents of ancestral travels, which shape and inform this place.

In drawing attention to this continuity of ancestral presence, both Michaels and Robertson testify to the continuing power of the Dreaming – a power that runs through all things, and unites all time and place. In their paintings, culture, aesthetics, history and place unite in a joyful continuum of colour and song. The Jukurrpa of Mina Mina is carried forward; its transformative power is expressed in an artistic evolution that pays homage to the past, while presenting a new vision for the future. On these fresh tongues, the exultant songs of the ancestral women are given new breath, proclaiming the creative power of Mina Mina for future generations.

Mina Mina Jukurrpa: Kelly Napanangka Michaels & Alma Nangala Robertson is on display at Mossenson Galleries in Perth, Western Australia from 1 June - 4 July 2010.