ART COMMUNITY DESCRIPTIONS
LOCKHART RIVER. QUEENSLAND
Lockhart River is a remote community on the east coast of Cape York,
far north Queensland, and Australia. Contemporary Aboriginal art
from Lockhart River is something new and unique to Australian Indigenous
art. It provides an intense visual insight into one of the world’s
most spectacular coastal wilderness areas, rich with diverse flora
and fauna. Their art is not just about place, but also about the
people who belong there and how an Aboriginal way of life takes
shape in remote communities in the 21st century.
Many aspects of Lockhart River art differ to Aboriginal art produced
in remote communities elsewhere in Australia. Lockhart River is
the only youth-driven art movement from remote communities. Instead
of developing out of the cultural tradition of elders handing down
inherited designs and symbols, Lockhart River contemporary art emerged
as a result of an innovative education program seeking vocational
opportunities for the community’s youth to equip students
with professional skills in printmaking, sculpture and acrylic canvas
painting. What grew out of this education initiative was the Lockhart
River Art Gang, a group of artists with a distinctly youthful perspective
of Aboriginal life and a keen understanding of their 21st century
worldly context. (Dr Sally Butler, art indigena dall’ Australia,
Exhibition Catalogue 2007)
YUENDUMU, NORTHERN TERRITORY
Three hundred kilometers northwest of Alice Springs, Yuendumu was
established in 1946 and handed over to its community of around 800
Warlpiri people in 1978.
Yuendumu art has, from its outset in the mid-1980s, been notable
for its use of bright colors and intricate patterns. Yuendumu’s
modern painting started some ten years after that at Papunya, 100
kilometers to the south. It came about following the distribution
of art materials by anthropologists Francoise Dussart and Meredith
Morris as a continuation of their research and recording of women’s
body painting designs. The new materials were enthusiastically greeted
by the women, a group of about thirty of whom undertook o paint
and sell enough decorated coolamons, beads and small boards to raise
money to buy a four-wheel drive vehicle.
The project was successful and, shortly after, the community asked
several of the male elders to paint Dreaming stories on the school’s
doors in order to pass them on to the children and younger members
of the community.
Unlike those of the sister community, Papunya, who decided to restrict
their palette to ochre-like colors, Yuendumu painters have always
used bright acrylics of many hues. Since the 1980s, Yuendumu’s
paintings show denser and more brilliant coloration, smaller dotting
and mosaic-like patterns.
Jukurrpa, the Dreaming lore on which the painting is based, pervades
every aspect of life. It is fundamental to lifestyle, codes of behavior,
respect for the land, the law, the relationships within the tribe,
the ritual and ceremony, hunting and food gathering.
Also, unlike its sister community of Papunya, the majority of
whose painters have been men, easily more than half of Yuendumu’s
artists are women. (Susan McCulloch, Contemporary Aboriginal Art:
A guide to the rebirth of an ancient culture, Allen & Unwin,
Crows Nest NSW Australia, 2001)
PAPUNYA, NORTHERN TERRITORY
Some 250 kilometers west of Alice Springs, Papunya was the last
of the Aboriginal reserves to be set up by the federal government
in 1960.
The Honey Ant mural which teacher Geoffrey Bardon had encouraged
the painting of on the walls of the schoolhouse at Papunya in 1971
was, as he says, the start of the whole Central and Western Desert
art movement.
Generally speaking, and at their most literal level, the contemporary
paintings are maps, charting the vast terrain of the Western Desert
and its minutest detail – from the travels of the Tingari
ancestors to the tiny scratching in the sand of a bandicoot. The
notion of movement or momentum is intrinsic to Indigenous desert
life. The artists themselves travel widely, as did their ancestors,
and the stories they depict primarily concern the creative journeys
of ancestral men, women and supernatural beings. (Hetti Perkins
and Hannah Fink, One Sun One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia,
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Australia, 2007)
The palette of Papunya Tula art is predominantly restricted to
the four basic colors – yellow, white, red and black –
of the naturally found ochre and charcoal. Stylistically, Papunya
art remains quite formal, although there are a few individual exceptions.
HAASTS BLUFF, NORTHERN TERRITORY
The painting movement at Haasts Bluff, 230 kilometers west of Alice
Springs, has evolved since the early 1990s. The opening of the Ikuntji
Women’s Centre acted as a catalyst for increased art activity,
particularly by the local women. High-profile artists have emerged,
or alternatively consolidated their artistic careers as a result
of this initiative. The latest paintings of Haasts Bluff artists
are notable for their variety of styles and often strong coloration.
UTOPIA, NORTHERN TERRITORY
The Eastern Desert community of Utopia, 230 kilometers northeast
of Alice Springs, was not, as were many of the other major central
desert art-producing communities, established as either a government
settlement or mission station. Rather, the property was a pastoral
station started by European-settlers in the 1920s.
Utopia’s modern-day art movement started in 1977 when a
batik-making fabric workshop evolved as a corollary to a women’s
adult education literacy course. It remains the case that the majority
of the practicing artists from the region are women, and the influences
of the batik style can still be seen in acrylic painting from the
area 30 years later.
Contemporary artwork from Utopia tends towards either of two broad
stylistic extremes. Of the ‘gestural abstractionists’,
Emily Kam Ngwarray perhaps went further than other artists. Throughout
her painting career she constantly experimented with line, dot,
color and tone, challenging the existing notions of the ‘traditional’
in Aboriginal art because she did not use the more familiar imagery
of the Western desert painters – motifs such as concentric
circles, animal tracks and stylized implements.
Perhaps no other group of artists from Central Australia has explored
the myriad possibilities of the ‘dot’ as widely as those
from Utopia. Some artists incorporate bush plants and features of
figurative landscapes within finely dotted fields of vibrant colors
placed in pointillist juxtaposition. Some artists use more delicate
colors, and their paintings have the chimerical quality of the mirages
that play above the horizon during the hot months. Other artists
oscillate from one form of representation to another, such as Gloria
Temarre Petyarre. (Jenny Green, One Sun One Moon: Aboriginal Art
in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Australia,
2007)
BALGO, WESTERN AUSTRALIA
Deep in the Western Desert, Balgo is one of the most isolated of
Australia’s desert settlements. Established as a Catholic
mission in 1939, Balgo became an Aboriginal-controlled community
in 1981.
Balgo art derives from its law and culture which incorporates
events since the advent of the white man with those of Dreamtime,
making for a constantly evolving, living culture. The first works
reflected, as well as traditional Aboriginal iconography, some imagery
based on Christian myths. Balgo artists always preferred extremely
bright, strong and numerous colors. Eubena Nampitjin’s superb
use of color and free design has brought her boldly individual works
international acclaim. The artists of the region, old and young,
have made an important contribution to the wealth of expression
of Indigenous art.
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