1xmL3tg

Spirit
OF AUSTRALIA
next wave
Australian Indigenous contemporary
art is flourishing as a vital component
of the world’s oldest living culture.
WORDS SUSAN McCULLOCH
IN THE WORLD of visual artist Tony Albert,
hierarchies are precarious things. His metre-high triangular
towers of vintage playing cards are delicately balanced affairs.
Laced with fine metal and collaged images, symbols and
loaded text (“We Come In Peace”, “Space Invaders”), they
point to the role that chance plays in determining cultural
identity. Other recent works show Indigenous young men as
moving targets, skating across the canvas like warriors of
yesterday, while others highlight the inherent racism of kitsch
souvenirs from times past. Such images have won this
33-year-old, North Queensland artist both the 2014 Basil
Sellers Art Prize and the 2014 National Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Art Award.
Daniel Boyd’s large mixed-media work, which won the
Queensland Kudjila/Gangula painter this year’s $80,000
Bulgari Award at the Art Gallery of NSW, is a poignant meld
of the personal and the historic in its referencing of Vanuatu’s
Pentecost Island, which was 31-year-old Boyd’s great, great
grandfather’s country before he was brought to Australia as
a “blackbird” slave worker for the sugarcane industry. ›
Teresa Baker, Kalaya Tjukurpa,
2012, acrylic on linen 200 x 200cm
PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY THE ARTIST/TJUNGU PALYA
44 QANTAS NOVEMBER 2014

SPIRIT OF AUSTRALIA ART
Tony Albert, We Come In Peace,
2014, vintage playing cards and
metal (left); Mavis Ngallametta,
Kendall River, 2012 (below)
MAVIS NGALLAMETTA: MARTIN BROWNE/COURTESY THE ARTIST/MARTIN BROWNE CONTEMPORARY, SYDNEY; TONY ALBERT: COURTESY GREG PIPER & SULLIVAN+STRUMPF FINE ART, SYDNEY
Yhonnie Scarce, of Kokatha and Nukunu heritage (South
Australia) explores the aesthetic power of glass in luminous sculptural
installations that the 41-year-old calls “politically motivated
and emotionally driven”. In the elegant, monochromatic prints of
Queensland photo-artist Michael Cook, a 46-year-old Bidjara man,
exist an alternative reality hovering between contemporary and
colonial eras as the question is posed: “What if the British, instead
of dismissing Indigenous societies, had taken a more open approach
to their culture”
ALBERT, BOYD, SCARCE and Cook are at the forefront
of a growing school of new-generation, urban Indigenous artists,
many art school-trained, whose work is being exhibited here and
overseas, snapped up by institutions and private collectors, and
recognised with awards. Their contemporaries include painters
Christopher Pease, photographers Nici Cumpston, Archie Moore
and Bindi Cole, installation artist Jonathan Jones, and multimedia
artists Reko Rennie and Brian Robinson. Amsterdam-based photo,
video and sound artist Christian Thompson is undertaking a PhD
in Fine Art at Oxford University, one of the first two Indigenous
Australian students at the 900-year-old centre of learning.
Many of them don’t necessarily label themselves Indigenous, yet
most identify strongly with their heritage and reference it in their
art, along with that of a broader Indigenous experience. They follow
a trail blazed by artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Brook Andrew, Danie
Mellor, Leah King-Smith, Vernon Ah Kee, Gordon Hookey, Arone
Meeks, Joanne Currie, Bianca Beetson, Destiny Deacon, Robert
Campbell, Trevor Nickolls, Richard Bell, Gordon Bennett, Judy
Watson, Lorraine Connelly Northey, Darren Siwes and Fiona Foley.
These artists, in works of telling narrative or pithy commentary, have
helped shape a new visual identity for Australia by placing the
Indigenous experience at the cutting edge of contemporary art
practice. Are these, then, the new faces of Australian Indigenous art
Where do the canvases of the desert, the ochres of the Kimberley
and barks of the Top End that have long dominated the popular face
of Aboriginal art now fit
“I believe there’s work of stature being produced in many areas of
Indigenous art,” says National Gallery of Victoria director Tony
Ellwood. “The work of artists such as Michael Cook, who was the
talk of the Biennale of Sydney, Tony Albert, Yhonnie Scarce and
other art school-trained artists are definitely attracting a huge
amount of attention, but so, too, are many of the newer generation
of artists of the APY Lands (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara),
Papunya, the Top End, Queensland, the Torres Strait Islands and
other regions. It’s all adding up to a very rich scene.”
The NGV’s own recent survey of Victorian contemporary art,
Melbourne Now, featured the work of emerging Victorian Indigenous
artists Steaphen Paton, Brian Martin and Maree Clarke, weaver and
multimedia artist Lisa Waup, and photographer Steven Rhall. >
NOVEMBER 2014 QANTAS 47

SECTIONHEAD LIGHT
Daniel Boyd with his
untitled 2014 Bulgari
Art Award winning
entry (above); Michael
Cook, Civilised #5, 2012
(above right); Michael
Cook, Undiscovered #2,
2010 (right)
Ellwood’s view is shared by
South Australian Indigenous
art curator Nici Cumpston.
“I think there’s an equal, if
perhaps different, following
for art from the urban areas
than that from the more remote regions,” she says. Cumpston, of
Afghan, English, Irish and Barkindji heritage, is an exhibiting art
photographer and the director of Tarnanthi, an Indigenous visual
arts festival to be held in Adelaide in October 2015. She has been
proactive in building relationships with the painting communities
of the APY and NPY (Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara)
lands of northern and western South Australia. The first wave of
artists from this region in the 1990s included the late master painters
Jimmy Baker, Tiger Palpatja, Wingu Tingima, Eileen Stevens,
Tommy Mitchell, Robin Kankakapatja, Militjari Pumani and the
still-living Hector Burton, Jimmy Donegan, Tommy Watson and
Dickie Minyintiri. Theirs was a late outpouring of desert art, bursting
onto the scene more than 20 years after the Western Desert Papunya
movement set the benchmark for desert painting with works
collected at fever pitch for more than a decade.
“Adelaide is fortunate to be placed historically as the
administrative centre for much of these lands, giving
us the opportunity to reinforce these links artistically,”
says Cumpston. “However, such collaborative process
must be entirely equal and grow over time, with full
acceptance by not only the artists, but their broader
communities.” Collaborative projects such as the large
installation of birds in flight by the women of the Tjanpi
Desert Weavers that featured in the Art Gallery of South
Australia’s 2013 Heartland exhibition – and the multiartist
paintings the gallery commissions – may be an
end in themselves. However, notes Cumpston, the
enthusiasm that such projects inspire often flows on to
artists’ individual practice.
The new wave of painters from this region include
Tjungkara Ken, Sylvia Kanytjupai Ken, Nyumiti Burton,
Tjungkaya Tapaya and Carlene Thompson; some, such
as Linda Stevens, Teresa Baker and Betty Pumani are the daughters
and grand-daughters of founding painters. The large-scale ceramics
by Ernabella artists are also winning praise nationally.
In the Top End, Darwin’s Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern
Territory added a $5000 Youth Award to its range of prizes for this
year’s National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.
Finalists included Amata, South Australian photographer and artist
Rhonda Dick, Yirrkala’s Burrthi Marika, South Australia’s James
Tyler and Year 12 Sydney student Harley Grundy, along with >
DANIEL BOYD PHOTOGRAPHY: JENNI CARTER; MICHAEL COOK: COURTESY THE ARTIST/ANDREW BAKER ART DEALER, BRISBANE
48 QANTAS NOVEMBER 2014

SECTIONHEAD LIGHT
Kieren Karritypul, Yerrgi (detail), 2014 (above);
Gunybi Ganambarr, natural earth pigments on
larrakitj (sacred pole), 2013 (right)
inaugural Youth Award winner Kieren Karritypul,
who comes from from Daly River.
In East Arnhem Land at Yirrkala the traditional
medium of bark painting is also undergoing something
of a revolution. Gnarled and pitted tree trunks,
irregular shaped barks, glistening thin strips of metal, PVC piping,
industrial-grade rubber offcuts from the conveyor belts of a nearby
bauxite mine, ceiling insulation and galvanised iron from old water
tanks – all these materials have provided Yirrkala artist Gunybi
Ganambarr with a rich source of surfaces on which to create finely
wrought, innovative and award-winning works of art.
The 41-year-old Ganambarr started making art in the mid 2000s
and within a few years had won major awards including Queensland
Art Gallery’s Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Artists Award in
2008 and the 2011 WA Indigenous Art Award. “It started from [my
learning of] our djalkiri (foundation) of our law. I saw what
was true and what was false, I began to learn more and
more. I worked on the same level, flat bark, and then it
started to change and kept changing,” he says.
Sydney critic John McDonald calls him “a revolutionary
artist, more so than any artist I’ve known, including
Picasso.” Will Stubbs, coordinator of Yirrkala’s Buku
Larrnggay Mulka art centre calls Ganambarr an artist who
plays by the rules of his clan, but “transgresses every
stylistic boundary set by habit or convention... working
within an age-old set of beliefs, he treats the secular
elements of his art as a field of unlimited possibility.”
Ganambarr, whose 12 years as a builder in East Arnhem
Land communities also plays a pivotal role in his art, says
that he uses reclaimed materials both for their creative
potential and for environmental reasons – to “give the trees
a rest” from over-culling for didgeridoo and art making,
as well as “to balance the Yolngu [Arnhem Land people]
and Ngapaki [European] world systems”.
Like Ganambarr, mid-40s painter Yukultji Napangati’s
first solo show (in Sydney this year) was a sell-out. One of
the younger artists of the powerhouse desert art centre
Papunya Tula, Napangati is part of the family who walked
in to Kiwirrkura in 1984 to worldwide media claims as
being among the last to have lived a fully traditional bush
life. She starting painting in 1996, was selected for the
Museum of Contemporary Art’s emerging artists survey,
Primavera, in 2005, and was a Wynne Prize finalist in 2011
and 2013. Her closely placed lines of dots track the surface
of the canvas with such fluidity that they appear, as her
Sydney gallery director Christopher Hodges says, “like a
heat haze or mirage”.
At Aurukun, on Cape York Peninsula, the large-scale
ochre and mixed-media canvases of Mavis Ngallametta
have created what Sally Butler, senior lecturer in art history
at the University of Queensland, calls “possibly the
quietest stampede in the Australian art market. Over the
past three and a half years, nearly every major public and
private art collection in Australia has acquired large-scale
[Ngallametta] paintings”. Her expansive canvases, with
their meandering tidal flows, mountains and ochre washes
are, says Butler, like “interactive maps” that offer a “vivid and intense
experience of place that spirals across macro and micro perspectives
of her coastal wetland region”.
The 70-year-old Ngallametta’s paintings are stylistically and
culturally different from any other Aboriginal work. As such, they
exemplify one of the great truisms of Aboriginal art. As veteran
Papunya Tula manager Paul Sweeney says: “Everyone’s looking for
the new young art stars, but often the next ‘star’ that emerges will be
a mid-40s or older man or woman who’s been working away quietly
for some time and whose art just starts to gel.” A
KARRITYPUL PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY ANNANDALE GALLERIES; GANAMBARR: COURTESY MUSEUM & ART GALLERY OF THE NT
50 QANTAS NOVEMBER 2014