Choosing Who Will Keep the Stories Strong: The Garrawurra Artists of Milingimbi

The following article appeared in Artlink, Vol 29, no. 3, 2009


In the wake of the Federal Government’s 2007 Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory, negative portrayals have dominated media coverage of remote Indigenous communities. Reports of violence and substance abuse have been held as symptomatic of the breakdown of Indigenous family structures and the annihilation of Indigenous culture. This narrative has spilt into art criticism, where the works of senior Indigenous men and women are often viewed through the prism of a cultural mausoleum. In a discourse steeped in the melancholy longing for lost authenticity, each mark upon the canvas is framed as the last glimpse of a fading world.

This is the story of group of contemporary Indigenous artists on the small island of Milingimbi, off the coast of central Arnhem Land. It is not a story of cultural annihilation, but rather, one of renewal. It shows the resilience and adaptability traditional Indigenous family systems, and how one community has internally guided transformations in familial and clan relationships in order to meet their changing needs in the modern world.

In early 2006, the renowned Liyagauwumirr painter Mickey Durrng Garrawurra passed away in his home on Milingimbi. For many years, Durrng (1940-2006) and his brother Tony Dhanyala (1935-2004) were the only people authorised to paint the Liyagauwumirr’s most important clan designs: the Djirri-didi painted on the body during the Ngarra cleansing ceremony. There is a refined elegance to these designs: at their simplest they consist of nothing more than a series of austere horizontal bands of yellow, red and white. To the Liyagauwumirr, however, they contain all the mysteries of their ancestral homelands. According to Durrng, “These designs are the power of the land. The sun, the water, creation, for everything.”1 Rich in ‘inside’ meanings, the full ‘story’ contained within these designs was traditionally known only to initiated Liyagauwumirr men. Before his death, however, Durrng made the seemingly unorthodox decision to pass this knowledge and authority to his sister Ruth Nalmakarra (b.1954) and her family. What followed was a flowering of tradition, as Nalmakarra and her sisters used this broadened authority to instigate a cultural revival that united their community around these ancient designs.


The striking visual power of the Djirri-didi first came to widespread attention in the early 1990s, when Durrng began painting them on bark. His combination of strict geometries and flat-plane fields of colour was in marked contrast to the fluidity and fine cross-hatching for which much Arnhem Land art was admired. As Djon Mundine has noted, Durrng’s work was met with a mixed critical response, with many curators, collectors and critics claiming that his paintings looked “too modern.”2 In some cases, the crispness and formal order of Durrng’s barks was mistaken as a calculated acquiescence to the aesthetic of late-modernist abstraction. In other instances, it was simply that his cool contemporaneity was out of step with an art market that festishised the primitive.

But Durrng’s primary concern was always tradition and continuity, as opposed to any aspirations towards modernism. Although ‘modern’ in appearance, his designs adhered strictly to those painted on the body during the Ngarra ceremony. Ostensibly a mortuary rite performed to remember the dead and to prepare their spirits for the afterlife, the Ngarra ceremony is also a celebration of regeneration and renewal that recalls the ancestral travels of the Dja’nkawu Sisters. According to legend, during creation time, the two sisters Dhalkuwrrngawy and Barradawy crossed the landscape giving birth to the first people of the Dhuwa moiety. The sisters created the Dhuwa’s clans, languages, names, ceremonies and customs. During the Ngarra ceremony, the Liyagauwumirr paint their bodies and ceremonial objects in the tri-colour of Miku (red), Watharr (white) and Buthjalak (yellow) in recollection of the Dja’nkawu Sisters’ travels. The participants hands are painted white to signify the Sisters’ landing on the mainland at Yalangbara (near Groote Eylandt), while other markings symbolise key moments on their journey, such as sites at Garriyak and Dhambala, where they created sacred waterholes by piercing the ground with their digging sticks.

Chris Durkin recalls vividly the first time he met Mickey Durrng. Fresh from a tenure as a field-officer for Papunya Tula Artists, in 2005 Durkin was employed by the Milingimbi Council to re-establish an art centre on the island. As an artist at the end of his life, Durrng was desperate to continue recording his stories and designs. The artist approached the newly appointed arts coordinator saying, “I’m Mickey and I’m a famous artist. I’ve had exhibitions in Paris and London. You’ve got to give me materials to paint.”3 Through the auspices of the new Milingimbi Art Centre, Durkin began providing the ailing artist with materials so that he could produce what would be his final body of work.

As Durrng’s health deteriorated, Durkin got to know the artist’s extended family. Durrng was one of the last senior men of the great Garrawurra family of ‘seven fathers’. Durrng’s grandfather sired seven sons, of whom Durrng’s father Nupurray Garrawurra was the youngest. An artist in his own right, Nupurray fathered around 10 children of his own, including the artists Margaret Rarru (b.1940), Lena Walunydjanalil (b.1944) and Helen Ganalmirrawuy (b.1955). After the death of his elder brother Madanggala Garrawurra, Nupurray also raised his brother’s children, which included Ruth Nalmakarra.

In the often-patriarchal systems of Indigenous law, Durrng’s decision to pass clan authority to his sister may seem like a drastic measure, indicative of the breakdown of family structures and the lack of male role-models. In reality, the reasons for Durrng’s actions are far more complex. Firstly, by chance, both Madanggala and Nupurray fathered more daughters than sons, meaning that Mickey’s generation was dominated by women. More importantly, however, the decision was based on a considered concern for the survival of these stories. Ruth Nalmakarra explains:

Elders have a responsibility to choose who should take over the leadership to carry on the stories. It happens this way because people are passing every day, every month, every year. In that case, before they pass, they have to call on those people that they can choose to keep the stories strong. They look to people with strong feelings and a strong voice. They appoint them to know and to carry on the story.

The key responsibility for elders such as Durrng is to ensure they select the person best suited to keeping the stories strong. In the case of the Liyagauwumirr, it was not simply that there were no available men, but rather, that Durrng saw Nalmakarra as the best advocate for these stories. In his view, she was the strongest cultural person; more knowledgeable, committed and vocal than her surviving brothers. Moreover, it is important to note, that although these were traditionally ‘men’s’ stories, no cultural knowledge was lost in this transaction. Lindy Allen, Senior Curator of Northern Australian Indigenous Collections at Museum Victoria argues that often senior women’s knowledge of important ceremonial stories is underestimated: “They are not expected to speak about such things, but they often know them.”5

In October 2006, after a period of mourning for their brother, Nalmakarra and her sisters began to revive the clan designs that he had entrusted to them. Although many of the women were accomplished weavers, the gender restrictions on their clan designs meant that none had painted before. After tentative beginnings, soon a prolific outpouring of paintings began to emerge. Durkin recalls:

It was unforgettable! They left it for a while after Mickey’s death, but then all of a sudden all these paintings started coming in from everywhere. And they were not ordered or repetitive, but crazy, like they had been hanging out to paint them forever. There were so many amazing designs.
6

John von Sturmer has argued that in Yolngu art, “Every painting carries with it the claim or the assertion: ‘I am entitled to paint this.’”7 In Durrng’s work, this manifest itself in his commanding understatement; as though his aesthetic restraint alluded to the power withheld from his representations. In the women’s paintings this sense of entitlement was revealed quite differently. Where these works lacked the crisp precision of Durrng’s paintings, they replaced it with a keen sense of excitement, spontaneity and formal inventiveness. Whilst this was undoubtedly due in some part to their lack of training, Durkin argues that it was also indicative of their excitement at their new authority. He notes, “While big law-men often paint in a strict controlled manner, these works are about playing with the designs, having great passion that reflects love, enjoyment and family. The women are embracing the opportunity to own it, to be proud of it.”8

This is best illustrated in a comparison between Durrng and his sisters’ depiction of one of the key Liyagauwumirr stories: the Gapu Milminydjarrk or Waterholes at Garriyak. In Durrng’s depiction of the story, the waterholes are always evenly sized and spaced, gaining their charge from the contrast of light and dark colours in a rigid geometric order. In approaching the same design, his sister Lena Walunydjanalil abandons this sense of order, irregularly arranging her waterholes so that they pulsate unevenly across the bark in a movement that comes more from her use of line than from tonal contrast. Margaret Rarru, on the other hand, utilises the irregular shape of the bark as a springboard for her designs, creating a tension between frame and content as her forms appear to push outwards against the border. In 2007, one of Rarru’s works was awarded the bark painting prize at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. Helen Ganalmirrawuy maintains some of Durrng’s geometric order, but has developed a much busier and complex decorative schema that relies heavily on white outlines – a technique rarely seen in her brother’s work. In fact, of the sisters, it is Nalmakarra whose work remains the strictest adherent to tradition. Nalmakarra’s paintings maintain a stately restraint, and in some instances, such as her use of cross-hatching, appear to hark back to even older aesthetic modes. Durkin speculates that this strict adherence is a result of both Nalmakarra’s respect for her brother’s legacy, but also the intense sense of responsibility that she feels for these designs. According to Durkin, “She knows she must be beyond indictment.”9

In the variations of the Liyagauwumirr women, we see a cultural and epistemic moment when shifts in family structure result in the rapid influx of new approaches to a traditionally restricted and highly formalised mode of art production. Howard Morphy has noted, that although Indigenous geometric designs appear stable over time, in reality they are “the springboard for creativity and diversity … responsive to the subtleties of aesthetic practice and the parameters of possible variation.”10 For the non-Indigenous art historian – necessarily ignorant of the restricted ‘inside’ meanings of the Djirri-didi – this presents a singular moment for aesthetic engagement when judgements can be made upon precisely those elements with remain constant and those which are open to experimentation and change. In doing so, it suggests alternative critical methodologies which are responsive to both cultural continuity and aesthetic innovation. Put simply, as Nalmakarra clarifies, “There are different ways of painting and different patterns, but they mean the same thing. We know the stories, so we know which ones to choose.”11

If this broadening of cultural authority has created a unique moment for non-Indigenous engagement with Liyagauwumirr design, under Nalmakarra’s stewardship it has also been an important moment for engagement within the community at Milingimbi. With Durrng’s authority, Nalmakarra and her sisters have made their clan designs available to a wide range of Liyagauwumirr artists, including a younger generation of artists such as Susan Yirrawuy (b.1974), Jocelyn Gumirrmirr (b.1974), Angelica Bulurruwuy (b.1986) and Durrng’s son Robert Djawdjawku (b.1971). Not only has this kept the designs strong within the Liyagauwumirr, but it has provided an important economic and cultural outlet at Milingimbi. The biggest problem facing the community at Milingimbi, according to Durkin, is “a lack of meaningful engagement with the Balanda (non-Indigenous) world.” Whilst young people at Milingimbi have strong traditional culture, they struggle to find value for this knowledge in the wider world. Durkin continues, “The only way this can be reconciled is by employing people in culturally relevant ways, such as at the art centre and school.” And this is precisely what Nalmakarra hopes to achieve through painting the Djirri-didi:

We want the children to learn that it is important for their culture, it is important for their art to be alive. That is why we have the art centre: to keep the paintings that the old people passed onto us, to keep them alive so we can pass them on to the next generation.

1 Mickey Durrng, quoted in Brenda Westley and Steve Westley, ‘Mickey Durrng: Artist of East Arnhem Land’, Aboriginal Art Online, [http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/resources/articles2.php]
2 Djon Mundine, ‘The Native Born’ The Native Born: Objects and Representations from Ramingining, Arnhem Land, exhib. cat., Museum of Contemporary Arts, Sydney, 1996, p105.
3 Chris Durkin, phone interview 12 June 2009.
4 Ruth Nalmakarra, phone interview 29 May 2009.
5 Lindy Allen, interview, Melbourne Museum, Carlton, Victoria, 11 June 2009.
6 Chris Durkin, phone interview, 12 June 2009.
7 John von Sturmer, ‘A Limping World: Works in the Arnott’s Collection – Some Conceptual Underpinnings’, They Are Meditating: Barks from the MCA’s Arnott’s Collection, exhib. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2008, p.50.
8 Chris Durkin, phone interview 12 June 2009.
9 Chris Durkin, phone interview 12 June 2009.
10 Howard Morphy Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories, University of NSW Press, Sydney 2008, p77.
11 Ruth Nalmakarra, phone interview 29 May 2009.
12 Chris Durkin, phone interview 12 June 2009.

Some Thoughts on the Paintings of Billy Kenda

A truck screams across the desert. The heat belting down upon the asphalt makes it glow a deep, languid blue. The driver has his eyes fixed forward upon the road as it stretches out onto the horizon. His face bears a wobbly smile, as though absorbed in the rhythms of the latest catchy tune blaring on his car radio. Around him, the desert rises in glorious majesty; purple mountains ascend into a crimson sky that beams down upon the desert’s gleaming yellow sands. But the driver does not note this grandeur for he is transfixed by his journey, his eyes planted firmly on the highway as it speeds him to his destination.

For Billy Kenda, the desert landscape is a place of Arcadian splendour. His depictions of country are the sanguine songs of a contented heart; prelapsarian odes to his beloved desert idyll. Rolling hills recede into the picture plain, enveloping the viewer and drawing the eye inwards in a transitory recession. Born in 1972, Kenda began painting in 2004 through the auspices of Mwerre Anthurre Artists (Bindi Inc) in Alice Springs. His father was a Ngaatjatjarr man from Docker River, but Kenda’s paintings are dominated by his mother’s country near Jay Creek in the West MacDonnell Ranges. This is the country where Kenda was raised in the shadow of the purple hills made famous by Albert Namatjira, and in many ways, Kenda’s paintings continue the halcyon vision of his artistic forebear.


And yet, increasingly, Kenda’s landscapes have become dominated by motor vehicles. Cars and trucks speed across the landscape, blocking it, and drawing the viewer to the foreground of the image. At times, these vehicles dominate the picture, and the landscape becomes little more than a hurried, unfocussed blur at the edge of the canvas. In Kenda’s paintings, the motor vehicle becomes a metonym for the encroachment of western modernity upon the Indigenous cultural landscape, offering a subtle, but powerful critique of western vision and our reluctance to embrace or acknowledge an Indigenous view of the land.

It is in this sense that the comparison between Kenda and Namatjira is perhaps most apt, for it was in the works of Namatjira that western audiences were first exposed to an Indigenous vision of the landscape. In his depictions of country, Namatjira appropriated the western tradition of landscape painting as a means of empowering Indigenous perspective. As Ian Burn has noted, “The Arrente style may be interpreted as a strategy to control what is secret and what is sacred, while still expressing to a white audience an Aboriginal relationship to the land,” in order, as Galarrwuy Yunipingu continues “to demonstrate our continuing link with our country and our rights and responsibilities we have to it.” Namatjira’s paintings present a defiant call to see the landscape from an Indigenous viewpoint. In doing so, he helped inaugurate the Indigenous art movement which has gone on to be one of the dominant frontiers upon which Indigenous peopl e have engaged with modernity and shown their culture to be relevant, contemporary and strong.


Despite their apparent joviality, the work of Billy Kenda sits at a forceful critical intersection of this visual engagement with the hegemony of western vision. As western society spread into the heart of the nation, highways were built across the desert – Kenda’s traditional homeland. But highways are built upon the principle of fastest movement between origin and destination; upon the assumption that what lies between is unimportant. Margaret Morse has theorised that the car becomes the de-realised ‘non-space’ that allows us to negotiate this distance. In the interior of the motor vehicle the traveller is insulated from the outside world, achieving what Morse calls a ‘mobile privatisation’ that serves to displace or separate us from our surroundings. This contrasts severely with an Indigenous cosmology, in which it is songlines and not highways that run across the country connecting all places, people and things. In this worldview, travel becomes a process deeply connected to the landscape; a process of continuity, identity creation and placedness.

But the songlines of the highway are insular; disconnected. This is how Kenda depicts his drivers, absorbed in the detached world of their mobile cabin, bopping along in ignorant bliss to the enveloping beauty of the world around them. When cars are absent from Kenda’s landscapes, the landscape recedes into the picture plain, inviting the viewer to travel across Kenda’s country, to footwalk his hot sands, to taste the desert air and feel the heat upon one’s brow. The inclusion of cars refuses this engagement, pulling the landscape up flat and disallowing travel into the picture plain. Here we find the metaphor of Kenda’s paintings. They are a call to return to the landscape, to escape western vision and to actively see and engage with the world around us. Kenda’s paintings are a challenge to look beyond our assumptions; to see our blindness to the beauty of the world just beyond our frame of reference. For it is here, in the Arcadian splendour of the landscape that the real joy of Kenda’s paintings can be found and from which stems their unique vision and joyful contentment.

Peter Newry: History Paintings

A series of meandering lines roll across the canvas. Each one wavers delicately, but determinedly, as it breaks through rich veins of fulvous ochre. This is Laargen, located deep within the Keep River National Park, where during the wet season, dozens of small creeks unite to become a gushing torrent of water that breathes life into the desert landscape. It is the ancestral country of the Miriwoong, and in Peter Newry’s painting, it is depicted with a majestic solemnity. Newry’s hand is one of dignified restraint; his marks dance on the canvas like an arcane calligraphy, each line a Zen-like meditation on time and space.

In Hitsuzendo, the Zen art of calligraphy, a single line can evoke an entire world of meaning. The aim is to reach Samaai: the unification of the individual with the highest reality. In the act of calligraphy, Zen masters focus intensely to become one with the meaning of the characters that they depict. In the paintings of Peter Newry, a similar focus can be found. The landscape pours from his brush in simple lines that cut across broad swathes of ochre, invoking both the spiritual essence and material presence of place.

As Darren Jorgensen has noted, Newry is one of the Kimberley’s most restrained minimalists, taking the already austere planar style of East Kimberley painting – popularised by artists like Rover Thomas and Paddy Bedford – and reducing it to an enigmatic sparsity. In western art and literature – from Sidney Nolan to Patrick White – the desert’s broad spaces induced fear as identity was dissolved amidst the oppressive infinity of the wilderness. For Newry, however, it is from these seemingly empty spaces that identity is revealed. Through his simple lines, the form of the landscape is evoked in absence. Landmarks are not so much depicted, as alluded to; space is evoked along cragged ridges, whose jutting edges speak of a long life in the Kimberley.

Peter Newry was born around 1939 at Newry Station in the East Kimberley, where he lived for the next fifty years. According to Newry, he “grew up on the back of a horse.” A skilled stockman, he worked on the station until the 1970s, after which he was employed in numerous hard labours, including picking cotton and working as a builder’s labourer during the construction of the township of Kununurra. Although an important cultural man of the Miriwoong, Newry approaches this role with a dignified humility, reticent to reveal too much of his knowledge to outsiders. The spiritual content of his work and the sacred places it depicts, is often left understated or unexplained in Newry’s paintings.

Nevertheless, it was the very task of recording his sacred geography that inspired Newry to commence painting in 2002. Newry was persuaded to commence painting by the late, great Gadjerriwoong artist Paddy Carlton (c.1926-2006), who extolled the importance of Newry recording his knowledge of his traditional country. Charged with this weighty task, Newry’s early works were frenetic cartographic exercises, as he attempted to depict vast areas of country in great detail. More recently, however, Newry has restricted himself to a smaller number of specific locations – those places with a profound personal resonance. These works are not so much about mapping, as becoming one with the country through painting. Newry is no longer attempting to produce encyclopaedic maps of Miriwoong country, but rather, trying to achieve a unity that embodies the landscape, becoming more realistic by its ability to transcend representation to embody the very essence of the landscape.

Newry describes these paintings as “history paintings.” For Newry, ‘history’ is a term filled with gravity; his use of it reflects the weight and seriousness with which he views his art practice. The history to which it refers is that of his Miriwoong country: the true stories of how places were made. In ascribing them the gravity of ‘history’, Newry confirms his paintings as stories told the ‘right way’, as they were passed down by his ancestors. And yet, this is not history painting in the western sense, for unlike his academic predecessors, the ‘history’ of Newry’s paintings is not something limited to the past, but rather, is continually unfolding. Unlike the paintings of David or Vernet, the history embedded in Newry’s paintings is not depicted, but revealed via the residual ancestral presence that sanctifies the landscape and connects it to the sacred Ngarrangarni or Dreaming.

According to Cathy Cummins, Manager of Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, “Peter Newry’s paintings invite us to acknowledge a level of understanding that is poetic, intelligent and deeply connected. At a time when Indigenous art teeters on the balance of what it has achieved and what more is possible Peter Newry stands up and reminds us that the land is poetry, it is history, it is the story of a culture whose truths are increasingly vulnerable.” In Newry’s paintings, we find a Zen-like unity with the landscape whose power derives from its temporal and spatial connection with Ngarrangarni. As he works to pass this knowledge onto his children, grandchildren and relatives at Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, Newry creates his own history, moving East Kimberley painting to profound new boundaries.

Peter Newry: History Paintings is on display at Mossenson Galleries, 41 Derby Street, Collingwood, Victoria from 7 April - 2 May 2010.

Jean Baptiste Apuatimi and Maria Josette Orsto

According to legend, the Jilamara or Tiwi body paint designs date back to the time of the spirit ancestors. They were created for the very first Pukamani ceremony, performed to mark the death of the creation being Purukupali. This ceremony was performed to ensure that the Tiwi would not die, but be reincarnated, and marked the end of the Tiwi creation period. Although ostensibly a mortuary ritual, the Pukamani is as much about regeneration and renewal, as it is about death. The Tiwi are instructed to take great care with the traditions of the Jilamara, but are also encouraged to use it to celebrate the power of creativity. In many ways, this dichotomy is the key to understanding both the power of Tiwi art and the genius of Jean Baptiste Apuatimi.

The gravitas of Tiwi art first came to widespread attention in the late 1950s, with the collection of 17 magnificent Pukamani poles by Tony Tuckson for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In the last decade, however, it has been Jean Baptiste Apuatimi who come to the fore as one of the tradition’s finest contemporary proponents and innovators. Born around 1940 at Pirlangimpi on Melville Island, she has forged forward with an unsurpassed skill for bold gesture, texture and colour; all signs of a confident artistry that derives from a lifetime of learning, watching the Jilamara used in ceremony and in the artwork of her late husband Declan Apuatimi.

This confidence allows Jean to balance formal investigation with a profound respect for cultural continuity. At the Tiwi Design art centre on Nguiu (Bathurst Island), Jean works surrounded by younger artists: her daughter Maria Josette Orsto and relatives Ita Tipungwuti, Margaret Renee Kerinauia and Roslyn Ortso. Sitting with Jean, these young women learn not just pwanga amintiya marlipinyini (dots and lines), but also the importance of originality; the expression of personality within these designs. Anyone who has ever witnessed the diminutive power of Jean performing her Jarrangini (Buffalo) dance, knows that she has a personality with the force of nature.

But like the Jarrangini dance, Jean’s work is about balance and tension. The essence of her practice might be seen in one of her most distinctive designs; Jikapayinga. Depicted as an irregular grid of squares, Jikapayinga refers to a female crocodile. It is a design that balances unity and individuality; each square is a unique object, but the power of the design comes from their interaction – the rhythmic ebb and flow as each square relates to its neighbour in part of a larger, more important narrative. In doing so, Jikapayinga creates a visual metaphor for the role of the individual within a greater tradition. And this is, indeed the key to Jean’s paintings. Jean Baptiste Apuatimi is a true master working in an ancient mode; she is an singular artist whose work gains its power by summoning up all the spirits of her ancestors, influences and progenitors. In doing so, she creates the truly individual vision of a world-class artist.

Kirrily Hammond: Swoon

It is a crisp summer evening in Alpine Victoria. Across the vista, the dusk clouds roll in, changing the light from a gentle mauve into a rich dark blue. Soon nightfall will turn the clouds into a shapeless darkness upon the horizon, but for now each one is trimmed with a brilliant glow, as though they have been delicately edged by a heavenly seamstress. For one passing moment the world is still.

As I recall this scene, I am immediately struck by the dull inadequacy of language to describe such majesty. How could any representation, be it literary or painterly, capture the profound, haptic experience of being in nature? How could a painting evoke the encompassing awe that causes one to swoon in the face of the sublime?

Over the past fifteen years, Kirrily Hammond has explored many different landscapes in her paintings, prints and drawings. Her early works reveled in a fantasy world of the imagination, in which anamorphic trees jostled with ethereal spirits and circus ghouls. More recently, however, she has found her inspiration in the real world, taking the landscapes of Gippsland, Mount Buller and Japan as her subject. In doing so, she has pushed away from the enclosed, personal world of the subconscious, towards a much more universal experience. For as much as we have shared dreams and fantasies, the surrealist vision is a highly personalised one. In her most recent landscapes, Hammond has gravitated towards intentionally unspecific or generic settings. Her paintings, she stresses, “are not about the landscape” and she intentionally seeks scenes that are geographically unrecognisable. In Hammond’s paintings, the landscape is clouded with the hazy light of dusk or dawn, and seems to exist as little more than a prop for her experiments in light and texture. As such, they take on the uncanny possibility that they could be anywhere. Although impossible to pin down their precise location, each one has a striking sense of familiarity, as though it is a place that one has visited in the distant past.

Concurrent with this thematic development, Hammond has settled into a small format that perfectly suits her cause. Each work exists as an exquisitely sealed hermetic portal onto a distant, but disquietingly familiar world. Looking at her paintings of clouds, such as Flight JQ3 2009, it is impossible not to be reminded of the tiny cabin windows of commercial airliners, while in her Gippsland Twilight series, the format evokes the view from a speeding car window, or perhaps that of a blurry Polaroid snap-shot.

In these paintings, Hammond is asking how we frame the sublime. Not simply how we represent the majesty of nature, but also how we recall it, how we package it, and how we consume it. More pertinently, they question how we overlook this majesty in our everyday lives. In the safe, comfortable space of the aeroplane or automobile, how often do we fail to notice the sublime as we speed on by? Margaret Morse has termed this the ‘precondition of distraction.’ The car interior becomes a de-realised ‘non-space’ in which the traveller is insulated from the outside world, achieving what Morse calls a ‘mobile privatisation’ that displaces us from our surroundings. A similar sense of ‘distraction’ might be conjured by the image of the tourist, unable to quantify any experiences not captured through the prism of their camera.

This is the challenge set by Hammond’s paintings, prints and drawings. For they are not about replicating the sublime, or even using paint to imitate nature in order to create a virtual swoon. Rather, Hammond’s vision is driven by a much more profound romanticism. As her paintings have become less reliant upon fantasy, they have insistently drawn attention to the beauty inherent in the world around us. Rather than being portals to an imaginary world, they point to a world just outside our windows; rather than a mystery beyond reality, these works point to the mystery within reality. It is this sentiment that causes one’s heart to swoon before Hammond’s paintings. As Sasha Grishin notes, “In Hammond’s depiction of the sublime, we do not experience the quality of terror and awe, but a sense of glowing inner radiance.” This is not the classical sense of the sublime, for there is no fear in this world. The mystery of Hammond’s work comes from seeing the familiar anew; realising beauty where before there was only the ordinary; finding majesty in the mundane; grandeur in the generic; the sublime in our everyday lives. Hammond challenges us to be constantly aware of the wonder and beauty that surrounds us, and that through this mystery we might learn to swoon again.

Kirrily Hammond: Swoon runs from 22 September - 10 October 2009 at Chapman & Bailey Gallery, 350 Johnston Street, Abbotsford, Victoria

Great Expectations: A Personal Reflection on the music of Gareth Skinner

I remember a warm summer morning in January 2009, sitting with Gareth Skinner on the balcony of Sydney hotel. We had been woken early by group of drunken teens frolicking in the hotel’s swimming pool. Nursing a mind-crushing hangover, I remember calling Skinner a cynic. Without a beat, he replied, ‘A cynic is what an optimist calls a realist.” Listening to Looking for Vertical, Skinner’s latest cello-driven opus, it might be easy to focus on the seemingly misanthropic cynicism of songs like “Your Pointless Life”, “Amateur Hour” or “There is No Light”. But this would be to miss the point. For Skinner isn’t a cynic, nor is he an optimist, or even a realist. Indeed, Looking for Vertical is far too thoughtful, complex and ultimately human body of work to fit neatly into such narrow categories.

At the epigraph of Confederacy of Dunces (one of Skinner’s favourite novels), John Kennedy Toole quotes Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Looking for Vertical is the restless work of an artist committed to the refutation of mediocrity. Like Ignatius J. Reilly, the anti-hero of Toole’s novel, Skinner’s work sits outside the mainstream: it is an indefinable blend of rock, pop, classical and art noise, driven with a baroque grandeur by Skinner’s inimitable cello playing. Unlike Reilly, however, there is a rigour and virtuosity to Skinner’s rejection of the mundane, ordinary and mediocre. A better comparison might be to the social criticism of artists like John Brack. For like Brack, Skinner’s work places expectations upon the listener and upon the very world around them. Their work presents a call to arms against stupidity, against the banal and against the vacuous. In doing so, they place expectations upon society – expectations that things could be better, smarter, more thoughtful and ultimately more human.

As a result, Looking for Vertical is an album filled with unexpected surprises. When he wishes, Skinner can conduct a world of sweetness and light, where sweeping cellos swoon in a feast of intertwining melodies [‘Intro’, ‘Interlude’, ‘Epitaph’]. At other points, Skinner’s cello takes on a tortured metallic squeal [There is No Light], or creates a freight-train rumble of driving rhythms [‘Looking for Vertical’]. In the world of Looking for Vertical, everything is in its right place, unless it fits better elsewhere, when it is inverted, distorted, ripped apart, twisted and torn beyond recognition. But this is not ‘quirkiness’ for its own sake, and Skinner’s work never devolves into self-indulgent zany-ness. Rather, Skinner’s experimentation appears as a natural extension of his restless and demanding ethos.

Virtuosic without recourse to flashiness, Looking for Vertical is brimming with the clear joy of playing – the pleasure taken in experimentation and in pushing his songs, arrangements and performace to their limits. The listening experience is, as a result, infectiously enjoyable. Songs like ‘Looking for Vertical’ and ‘More than What’ bounce joyfully along with a rhythmic insistency as primordial as any rock band, whilst driven by Skinner’s wild cello playing, which has no peer in Australia or abroad. No other string player can match both the artfulness of Skinner’s intensity, with his range and virtuosity. But it is perhaps, Skinner’s ability to transcend this virtuosity that makes Looking for Vertical such an exciting record to listen to. As Skinner sings in the song of the same name, “I don’t want your pointless life’. Looking for Vertical shows an artist who wants something much more – something exceptional. Fortunately, Skinner isn’t too cynical to think that it is something that we might all enjoy.

Looking for Vertical is available now 2009 through Rubber Records.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic

Below is an extended version of a piece that was published in Crikey this week.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic
Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne

Last Wednesday, amidst relatively little fanfare, the Ian Potter Museum at the University of Melbourne launched Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: the first ever exhibition of barks paintings from the Donald Thomson Collection. Thomson was a pioneering anthropologist, who amassed over 4500 objects during his expeditions into Australia’s north in the 1930s and 1940s. At the opening of the exhibition, a former trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria was overheard to say that perhaps Ancestral Power should have been the NGV’s ‘Winter Masterpieces’ exhibition. Certainly, in my experience, I have never seen anything quite like the twenty bark paintings on display. Put simply, they are some of the finest examples of Australian Indigenous art in existence. The fact that they have never been exhibited before, and remain relatively unheralded and unknown is quite staggering.

If the works in Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic were not so momentous, so profoundly moving and so visually dynamic, it would be easy for them to be overshadowed by the story of their creation and collection. It is Thomson’s name that echoes through the exhibition, particularly as several of the major works are unattributed. Nor are Thomson’s achievements without cause for celebration. A maverick young anthropologist, he entered Arnhem Land at a bloody crossroads in the Territory’s history. The Caledon Bay Crisis had seen the local Yolngu people clash with Japanese poachers, in a series of violent episodes that escalated to include attacks upon the local constabulary. In Canberra, there were fears of an Indigenous uprising in the North, and Thomson’s mission was intended as much as conciliatory and anthropological.

Arriving in central Arnhem Land in 1935, Thomson immersed himself in Yolngu culture, quickly befriending the important elder and Yolngu statesman Wonggu. Wonggu would later paint two monumental barks for Thomson, which remain some of the jewels in the collection, and form the centrepoint of Ancestral Power.

Thomson’s association with men like Wonggu, enabled him to amass one of the finest collections of Indigenous treasures in the world. Amongst literally thousands of objects, he amassed a body of around 70 bark paintings, of whose quality is unsurpassed in any other collection. Following his death in 1970, Thomson’s widow Dorita bequeathed the collection to the University of Melbourne; a bequest that, according to Mrs Thomson, was considered by the University to be “a bit of a nuisance.” The collection eventually found a home at the Melbourne Museum, where it remains of permanent loan.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic brings together 20 masterpieces from the Thomson collection. They have been carefully selected by Melbourne Museum curator Lindy Allen to represent the differing regional, clan and aesthetic varieties within the collection. Allen’s passion has been one of the driving forces in the preservation, documentation and exhibition of the Thomson collection.

When Allen arrived at the Museum in 1989, the Thomson collection was sadly neglected, in poor storage and with limited documentation. It took nearly five years before every item in the collection was properly photographed and catalogued. Armed with a hefty folder of photographic reproductions, in 1994 Allen began the complicated process of community consultation and fieldwork. At first, her folders were met with caution – for the local Yolngu were unaware of what dangerous or powerful images their predecessors may have depicted. But over time, Allen built trust. Every evening, she would have a knock on the door, and be greeted by a different Yolngu family asking to borrow the folder. Eventually, she began to assemble information on each work, and more importantly, consent to exhibit these prized pieces.

According to Allen, “It has taken until now for us to have the confidence that every one of these works could be shown.” Whilst she laments certain pieces that could not be exhibited due to an inability to locate the relevant family member, it is this deep integrity and respect that has endeared Allen to the communities in which she works, in much the same way as Thomson before her. Although it is difficult to assess, one suspects that this mutual respect has given the Yolngu confidence in Allen’s intentions, and in turn allowed her certain levels of accommodation. The curator notes, “It is often not about what can or cannot be shown, but about what can be said about the objects. It is about negotiating the grounds for engagement.”

In a broad sense, engagement is at the core of Ancestral Power. By the 1930s, the Yolgnu elders were faced with the difficult realisation that their survival depended upon defending their culture against the encroaching tide of modernity. According to Allen, the elders “had an understanding that they must engage with the outside world. They were thinking about how to tell the outside world about who they were; that this was their country. The works became like deeds to their land.”

The paintings produced for Thomson by Wonggu and the other elders were created to show the complexity, value and relevance of Yolngu culture. This lends them an urgent intensity, but at the same time, the barks included in Ancestral Power are works of meticulous grace and refined elegance. Each bark has been fastidiously prepared; perfectly cured and flattened, so that after seventy years they have not curled nor cracked: faults that plague bark paintings that have been hastily prepared for the contemporary commercial market.

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these bark paintings is that they represent the very genesis of two-dimensional painting in Yolngu culture. For whilst the Yolngu had long painted their sacred clan designs (or minytji) on the body and ceremonial objects, the barks collected by Thomson were the first time when these designs had been removed from their ceremonial ‘use’ context and applied for a purely aesthetic purpose.

This transferral required a considerable aesthetic inventiveness, for although the Yolngu had a wealth of traditional designs, these required modification to the new media. New motifs were introduced, particularly those figurative devices necessary for the depiction of grand narratives. This is particularly evident in the monumental depiction of the Djan’kawu Sisters Story by Mawunpuy Mununggurr, which is one of the highlights of the exhibition and an indisputable masterpiece of Australian painting. In attempting to depict the Djan’kawu Sister in her half-ancestral, half-Yolngu form, Mawunpuy’s work shows the dawn of Yolngu figurative painting and the introduction of several important techniques – such as the use of footprints to indicate land travel, and the use of contrasting sections of cross hatching and block colours in his figures. These techniques continue to reverberate through the lively contemporary schools of Yolngu painting at Yirrkala, Milingimbi and Ramingining.

The forms, content and images that emerge in these works define the history of Yolngu painting. With the benefit of retrospect, these early masterpieces reveal an evolving history, whose sparkle illuminates not only the past, but also the present and the future. But beyond their art historical or anthropological significance, the works included in Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic are visually astounding. Allen’s entire body lights up when she speaks of the ‘shine’ or bir’yun of these barks. According to Allen, this ‘brilliance’ was “intended to capture the essence of the wangarr [ancestors] an harness its strength and power or marr.” These are paintings that speak of a distant time, in an ancient language; and yet, by their brilliance they seek to transcend time: to be simultaneously ancient and modern. It is perhaps this reason, that despite their age, these works bristle with an urgency and power that is as striking for its formal and conceptual relevance as for the ancient cosmology which it evokes.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: Arnhem Land Painting and Objects from the Donald Thomson Collection
Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne
2 June – 23 August 2009