Artworks

Spotlight ON: Alma Kalaju WEbou

"I lost my mummy and sister here," said Alma Kalaju Webou when speaking of Pinkalarta, her mother's country where she was born and grew up in the Great Sandy Desert. The arid planes of this expanse stretch from Australia's north-western coastline into the heart of the Northern Territory. A seven-year drought in the 1970s exiled Webou's people, the Yulparija, to the Bidyadanga community south of Broome, at this time managed by a Catholic mission and operating as a catchment zone for several displaced Aboriginal language and social groups.
 
Pinkalarta's dense lattice of dot work not only represents the topographies of her country but is a recollection of her cultural memory, called up through landscape. Webou striates this canvas in fleshy, teal and marsh green pigments, effervescent colours corresponding to the saltwater landscape of Bidyadanga, transmuting her experience of migration on to the country she was forced to abandon. A linear intersection across the painting's top quadrant, reaching from the far left to the far right, red borders in the centre, entrapping a field of green hues, and the whole piece caught in a white frame reflects an aerial view of pastoral lands divided by fence lines. The incursions of cattle stations along the Canning Stock Route on Yulparija country during Webou's lifetime are perhaps pictured in this way. In sum, Pinkalarta is a tumbling together of red, pink and teal currents perhaps mimicking the rolling dunes of the desert. However compounded interpretations of Webou's work have the potential to become, Pinkalarta arises from the artist's personal context of contact history and broader cultural memory weaving together the stories of her country, leaving home and a bond built with a new one.

- Antonia Crichton-Brown, excerpt from curatorial commentaries.

Spotlight ON: SALLY GABORI

Gabori portrays her country as a vastly abstracted colour field. Landscape and moreover its depiction from an aerial perspective can be interpreted from the painting’s rugged texture and arrangement of colour in distinct blocks, but namely from its title. Gabori’s country was Mirdidingki, the toponym that her forename comes from, its suffix -ngathi translating from Kayardild language as “born at”. Gabori’s identification with this place is implied by the possessive in My Country’s title and the perceivable intimacy of the artist’s contact with her medium. In My Country, Gabori smeared technicolour acrylic across the breadth of the canvas. Her broad lashes of paint bleed at the contact points between colours, showing the speed at which she worked and her alla prima (wet on wet) treatment. My Country’s formation of shocking white, pink, orange and blue contours suggests vast passages of sand, salt, sea and sky made iridescent by bright sunshine. Brilliant colour such as this also tells of the vibrancy Gabori felt from the world that she saw.

My Country evokes an attitude of observing and spontaneously reproducing the appearance of a landscape as it changes under shifting light conditions in a passing moment, and this relates further to Gabori’s biography. Gabori and the other Kaiadilt people of Bentinck Island were forcibly removed by missionaries to Mornington Island in 1948, which catalysed decades of immense social and geographic dislocation. It was during this period that Kayardild was hardly ever spoken and traditional culture was virtually abandoned. Gabori returned to Bentinck Island in the 1990s when a small outstation was built in the southeast at Nyinyilki, and even then, it was not to stay but to visit. When she began painting at Mornington Island Arts, Gabori had spent half her life separated from her country, witnessing the dampening of her culture and language. Gabori’s personal life informs a biographical reading of her collected works, as they were not only vigorous and fervently produced but also stylistically idiosyncratic, as are paintings by other Kaiadilt women artists practicing in the same era. These works arguably embody Gabori’s individuated way of seeing and comprehending her world.

- Antonia Crichton-Brown, excerpt from Living Tracks: Networks In Indigenous Contemporary Art.

Spotlight ON: NYARAPAYI GILES

Nyarapayi Giles, a Ngaanyatjarra woman, began painting on canvas while settled in Patjarr Community, when the Modern Desert Art Movement sprung from Papunya Tula and gained astounding momentum. She has been described as a “first contact” woman as her youth was lived nomadically in the Gibson Desert. Giles painted between various communities in Ngaanyatjarra Lands until 2006 when Tjarlirli Art was established in Tjukurla Community, which lies between Kintore and Kaltukatjara (Docker River) resting on the banks of saltwater Lake Hopkins, its surrounding landscape bearing sandhills, claypans and desert oak trees. Karrku, where Giles was born, is an important cultural site associated with the Karlaya Tjukurrpa (Emu Dreaming) in which emus are rumoured to have gone digging in the local ochre deposit for the fine-grained powder that, when combined with water, transforms into a red, sanguineous substance. Red ochre, such as that found at Karrku, holds ceremonial weight, used in initiative body painting and later by artists on canvas.

- Antonia Crichton-Brown, excerpt from artist's biography.

SPOTLIGHT ON: LILY HARGRAVES

Turkey Dreaming by Lily Hargraves Nungarrayi depicts a Jukurrpa (Dreaming) of great significance to the artist. The work revolves around the bush turkey, also known to the Walpiri people as the Bustard or the Wardilyka. The painting’s setting is approximately 100 kilometres southwest of Lajamanu, within a range of hills known as Kulungalinpa. This location holds profound cultural significance for the Walpiri people and is the easternmost point of this Jukurrpa. In the painting, men hunt bush turkeys with boomerangs as the birds traverse the landscape in search of insects, their primary source of sustenance. Movement and the passage of time are conveyed by the creatures’ footprints, which line the edge of the waterhole. By portraying the movement of the bush turkeys in rectangular and circular arrangements, Hargraves represents the Jukurrpa as a cyclical event, wherein the creatures are not only hunted, but also transformed into humans, snakes and the water itself. The idea of metamorphosis, then, is at the heart of this Jukurrpa. This kind of transformation and anthropomorphic effect exemplifies the spiritual connection between First Nations Australians and the natural world.

- Julius Killerby, excerpt from curatorial commentaries.

SPOTLIGHT ON: HUBERT PAREROULTJA

A particularly vibrant work from Weer Loo - The Cry of the Curlew is Looking Towards the James Range, an acrylic depiction of a winding valley path, painted in  reds, browns and blues. It is clear is that the landscape depicted is in a process of transformation. We see this in the shift from yellow to red as the left slope meets its opposite hill; in the trees, some bare and others flourishing; and the pale blue vapours, which hint at coming rain. Whether or not Pareroultja intended this landscape as a metaphor for his life is unknown, but comparisons between the two seem inevitable: a path forged between two opposing hills, for instance, can be interpreted as a metaphor for a life lived between two worlds, with "... one foot in the Lutheran ways and one foot in the Arrernte culture" (Ken McGregor, in conversation with the author), or as Pareroultja himself puts it, living "... both ways..." (Hubert Pareroultja, in conversation with the author). 

- Julius Killerby, excerpt from curatorial commentaries.