MENAGERIE COMES TO TOWN

Brian Robinson, Githalai (Crab), 2008. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Australian Museum

Posted by Jeremy Eccles | 11.09.09

Gallery: Australian Museum
Dates: 05.09.09 : 15.11.09

We think of Aboriginal art primarily in terms of painting and abstraction. The land, the stories and even the Dreamtime characters – often people morphing into animals – are invariably represented on canvas or bark without figuration.

But indigenous art is always throwing up surprises. And now Sydney's Object Gallery – specialising in craft – and the Australian Museum have joined to curate a 33-artist show of 3-D creations which will tour the East coast for the next 2 years. The argument is that there are “rich object-making traditions” in the forms of weapons, shields, tools, containers, musical instruments and ceremonial items that have fed into an ethos in which “indigenous sculpture is on the increase”.
There are also women's weaving traditions – everything from mats to fish-traps – which have become sculptural and crossed the gender barrier as men weave animals out of recycled electric cable wire.
But there is no better example of the blending of old and new than Brian Robinson's Mud Crab (Gaithalai). This Kala Lagaw Ya man from Thursday Island in the Torres Strait has taken scarlet plastic sheets used for thongs, covered them in black lace, cut them into various crab parts and combined the pieces with the same delicate balancing skills that Senior TI man Ken Thaiday uses to create his famous Shark head-dresses – also in the exhibition.

Another fascinating contrast of old and new can be found with the two Murray Cod created by Treahna Hamm and Yvonne Koolmatrie. The elder, Koolmatrie is famous for her meticulous weaving of sedge grasses from the Coorong – her Pondi (Murray Cod) clearly derived from timeless basket-making traditions. Hamm on the other hand has the ecological threat uppermost in her mind as she uses rubbish from the River to manufacture her chemical-green fish.
Pity that in Sydney the two cod are in different exhibition sites. Elsewhere, though, they'll swim side by side.

Arnhemland inevitably throws up the purely traditional highlight – with Numbulwar's Djambawa Marawili's striking carved work giving three dimensional form to his bark masterwork called 'Metamorphosis of Baru' - the sacred crocodile. Man and animal are carved from the same tree, separated but morphing, and painted brilliantly too.
The completeness of this work might put much else in the shade, especially accompanied by Marawili's statement that he doesn't want people “only looking at pretty pictures any more; I want people to recognise our Law (in my works). It's all I can do”.

But the strength one can see in the survival of other artists on the scraps of the world – whether deeply buried roots of desert trees, barbed wire fences, rubbish-tip detritus troved on film by Badger Bates at Wilcannia or sheets of Tassie kelp – makes its point in the exhibition too. For instance, I've always tended to dismiss the hot-wire decoration on carved wooden animals from the Anangu people of the Western Desert as tourist-art. But the late Tjilpi Wara from Ernabella brings both spiritual and technical dimensions to his work that lift it right up out of the ordinary.
And the wisdom in the eyes of Judith Inkamala's big ceramic 'Budgie' brought to mind the importance of that bird in the education of young Aranda.

How much has the NATSIA Awards special Wandjuk Marika Prize for 3-D art encouraged this flowering? Several winners are present – Laurie Nilsen's barbed-wire emu, Janine McAullay Bott's courageous Frill-Neck Lizard, Dennis Nona here with a pair of bronze and aluminium sting-rays, Lena Yarinkura's mangy pandanus fibre camp-dogs, Craig Koomeeta's Cape York chunky carving, and this year's Big Telstra winner Danie Mellor – here showing politically-enhanced ceramic kangaroos.

Another thing worth noting is that Nona, Yarinkura and Koomeeta are just three of an increasing number of indigenous artists using the services of Brisbane's Urban Art Projects foundary to give their work a new, permanent form. Nona's dancing Stingrays are a peculiarly effective translation from the paper of his linocuts to sculpture.

On Saturday 3 October, in Sydney's Hyde Park three of Menagerie's fibre artists - Marina Murdilnga and Penny Milingu Wanapuyngu from Arnhem Land and Vicki West from Tasmania - will collaborate with local artists in a day-long outdoor sculptural weaving demonstration. Visitors will be able to ask questions of the participants and purchase woven items, including bags, baskets and small sculptures made by Indigenous artists.

After Sydney, Menagerie moves as follows:

Melbourne, Melbourne Museum, 11 Dec 2009 - 21 Feb 2010
Launceston, Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, 16 Apr - 27 Jun 2010
Adelaide, Tandanya, 23 Jul – 10 Oct 2010
Alice Springs, Araluen Arts Centre, 25 Feb - 10 Apr 2011
Cairns, Cairns Regional Art Gallery, 17 Jun - 14 Aug 2011
Brisbane, Museum of Brisbane, mid Sep - Dec 2011
Wagga Wagga, Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery, 6 Jan - 4 Mar 2012
Dubbo, Western Plains Cultural Centre, 23 Mar - May 2012

URL: www.object.com.au

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