[S]he quick p a i n t e r , q u i c k ly, looking, looking. No fishing, no hunting, no car, pa i n t i n g , pa i n t i n g e v e r y d ay e h ? Y o u been bring ‘em, [ s ] h e pa i n t i n g , pa i n t i n g , pa i n t i n g ! Maywokka May Chapman
- Doreen Chapman -
FORE W ORD FORM is privileged to co-present Manyjilyjarra artist Doreen Chapman’s first solo exhibition, in partnership with Martumili Artists. Doreen Chapman established her practice with Martumili Artists and has been a key member of FORM’s Spinifex Hill Artists since 2013. Chapman’s practice shows the influence of the senior Martu and Western Desert painters who surrounded her during her formative years, most importantly her mother Maywokka May Chapman, and Maywokka’s sisters Mulyatingi Marney and Nyanjilpayi Nancy Chapman, artists who have helped establish Martumili’s reputation as one of the country’s most innovative and accomplished art centres. With eleven of these Martu women she contributed to the iconic group canvas Ngayarta Jujarra (2009) through Martumili Artists. This spectacular work is now a centerpiece of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Aboriginal art collection, placing Chapman firmly within the attention of the national art scene. In support of the depth of artistic talent in the Pilbara, FORM established the Spinifex Hill Artists collective with our Principal Partner BHP Billiton in 2008. This venture for Aboriginal artists in the north eastern Pilbara is based in South Hedland, and is the first Aboriginal art centre in the area. Over time this small group of artists has grown in both size and ambition, acquiring new members, embracing new influences and systematically honing and refining their aesthetics. In 2014 a custom-built studio gave the group their new home in South Hedland, further buoying the artists’ confidence and professional development.
Since the opening of the studio Spinifex Hill Artists have been included in major curated exhibitions and prizes, won of numerous art awards, and interstate representation for artists among the group, have cemented their reputation as one of Western Australia’s most dynamic regional artists’ collectives. Among these successes, Chapman has won major prizes in the Cossack Art Award and Hedland Art Awards, in 2015 and 2016, and been profiled in the national arts media as an emerging artist on the rise. In recent years it has been exciting to see Chapman refine her signature style, which expresses her relationship to Country and the flora and fauna of the Western Desert with flair and humour. The 20 works comprising her first selftitled solo exhibition were created over 12 months across the two art centres, reflecting the trademark speed with which she paints. As a body of work, they exude the compelling assertiveness of a young artist who has truly found her voice. Through our artistic program FORM is committed to supporting extraordinary Western Australian artists such as Chapman who draw inspiration from the State’s diverse and spectacular landscapes, and articulate distinctively Western Australian stories. We are immensely proud to be presenting this first body of work from ‘the fastest brush in the West’. Lynda Dorrington Executive Director, FORM
Left: Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 91 x 61 cm, 2015 Previous spread: Portrait of Doreen Chapman by Tobias Titz, 2012
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 152 x 91cm, 2015
- Doreen Chapman -
FEARLE S S BRU S H Doreen Chapman’s eponymous debut exhibition marks the arrival of an extraordinary contemporary Australian painter. The twenty two acrylic paintings presented in this exhibition are the latest from the emerging Manyjilyjarra artist and were produced at Martumili Artists and the Spinifex Hill Studios over the past year. Doreen was born in 1971 in Jigalong, east of Newman, and grew up moving between desert communities in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. She has spent the majority of her adult life in Warralong, a community 120 kilometres southeast of Port Hedland. Doreen belongs to a powerful matriarchal painting movement that has been evolving in the Western Desert during the first part of the twenty-first century, largely thanks to the support and success of Newman-based Martumili Artists. Travelling around the Eastern Pilbara with her mother, Maywokka May Chapman, Doreen started participating in a culture of painting emerging from the last pujiman (desert-born or dwelling) generation. In these formative years she worked on smaller canvases, was involved in larger collaborations and observed the practice of celebrated female artists like Eubena Nampitjin, Bugai Whyoulter, Mulyatingki Marney, Nora Wompi, Nora Nungabar and of course Doreen’s own mother Maywokka. From a compositional and technical perspective, these more experienced artists influenced the younger woman’s early work, but there was always something inimitably ‘Doreen’ about her style, something unpredictable or even iconoclastic. Her contemporary practice retains elements of the pujiman influences, like the stippled brushwork of Bugai and Eubena, or the warbling bright lines that characterise Maywokka’s work. However, in the past two years, Doreen has made incredible advances in style, technique and consistency, leading to increasing critical recognition and to this moment of her first solo exhibition. Doreen is profoundly deaf. In the art centres she communicates with her hands and facial expressions, sharing a more expansive range of gestures with her mother and family. Doreen’s bush name is Ummama. Maywokka doesn’t have much fondness for this name because it was originally coined to taunt her daughter’s lack of coherent verbal articulation. Over the past year, however, Doreen’s critical and market success with her art has earned her a new status and respect within her local community. The art market that has provided income seems to have a different response to Doreen’s deafness and the lack of verbal insight around her work. In a wonderful and unexpected way, the silence enhances her enigma. The absence of language entices speculation and invites sustained viewing of her art. For Doreen, painting is a crucial mode of communicating her experiences, and for a viewer these paintings are the singular guide. Her art is her voice and her language. In this respect Doreen might be the envy of many contemporary artists and artists throughout history.
Even without an artist statement, a viewer can still make sense of Doreen’s work. In her naïve desert landscapes are family scenes, protective maternal figures, birds laying eggs, and triangular-bodied people hooking fish resembling figure-eights. Among her skies, hills and earth she places playful and charming fauna and flora. Birdies, snakes, turtles, horses, tracks, trees and brightly blooming plants recur throughout her work. Doreen’s landscapes are also populated with airplanes, helicopters and motorcars. As with the work of the pujiman generation, fresh water also has an important focus. There are rivers, soaks, and waterholes. Plump clouds send streaks of rain across hills and ranges (these are possibly Mikurrunya, a range of hills on Ngarla country visible from Strelley in the Pilbara’s north). In more recent paintings her clouds are rounded and resemble waterholes of the skies. Uniting her subject matter are suggestions of speed, colour, accident and play. It is this rapidity and confidence that makes Doreen’s practice and style so distinctive. Her hands never move with fear. Her left hand is dominant, and sometimes she is ambidextrous to save time on repositioning her body. At the Spinifex Hill Studios in South Hedland, she uses a round horsehair brush with a head the size of a thumb to make her larger paintings. Sometimes she will use chalk to map out a painting, but the application of the paint, especially larger negative spaces, is always fast, and new colours are dragged through the fringes of other colours that are still wet. It is high-risk, free-fall painting, and almost always completed in one sitting. Sometimes there is the appearance of irregularity in the outcomes, but her signature style is always identifiable within her dynamic marks. In Australia in the year 2016, a body of work by an Indigenous artist is still so often first described in terms of that artist’s ethnicity or culture. It is refreshing and liberating that Doreen’s work first commands adjectives like adventurous, fearless, unusual and humorous. There is no doubting that Doreen’s art has a deep connection to Country and is a continuation of a powerful matriarchal lineage. Yet here, in her debut solo exhibition, Doreen Chapman announces herself as the leading artist in the generation after the pujiman, as a maverick within the tradition, and positions herself at the vanguard of contemporary Australian painting.
Greg Taylor, Manager, Spinifex Hill Studios October 2016
Top: Untitled (snake), acrylic on canvas, 122 x 153cm, 2015, photograph by Greg Taylor, 2015, private collection Above: Untitled, acrylic on linen, 91 x 122cm, 2015, private collection
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 122 cm, 2015
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 91.5 x 101.5 cm, 2016
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 91x 119 cm, 2016
Above: Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 46 x 61 cm, 2016 Right: Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 122 cm, 2015
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 91.5 x 91.5 cm, 2016
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 91.5 x 91.5 cm, 2016
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 91.5 x 91.5 cm, 2016
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 91.5 x 100.5 cm, 2015
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 61 cm, 2016
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 61 cm, 2015
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 91 x 152 cm, 2015
Left: Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 46 cm, 2016 Top: Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 46 x 76 cm, 2016
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 91 cm, 2016
Above: Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 76 cm, 2015 Right: Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 91.5 cm, 2016
Left: Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 91 cm, 2015 Below: Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 101 cm, 2016
Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 69.5 x 94.5 cm, 2016
- Doreen Chapman -
ABOUT THE ARTI S T Manyjilyjarra artist Doreen Chapman was born in Jigalong, 1000 km north-east of Perth, in 1971. She grew up between a number of desert communities in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, and has spent the majority of her adult life in Warralong, a community 120km south-east of Port Hedland. Chapman began painting with her mother, respected senior artist Maywokka May Chapman, and first exhibited with Martumili Artists in 2010. She has been a regular presence at South Hedland’s Spinifex Hill Artists collective since 2013, and now paints at both Spinifex and Martumili. In recent years she has won major prizes in both the Cossack Art Award and Hedland Art Awards - two of Western Austraia’s most prestigious regional art prizes - and has been profiled in the national arts media as an emerging artist to watch. As a deaf woman, painting is an important means of communication for Chapman and provides vital insight into her experiences. She has been distinguished from her contemporaries by her joyful colours, the freedom of her brushwork, and her ability to work large canvas at speed, sometimes switching hands to maintain her frenetic pace. Her works articulate her relationship to the Martu lands of the East Pilbara, frequently incorporating representations of local flora and fauna, in particular snakes and bush turkeys.
Doreen Chapman at Spinifex Studios South Hedland, in 2016, with a sculptural work designed by Winnie Sampi. Photograph by Nils Friedrich.
CONTACTS FORM Head Office 39 Gugeri Street, Claremont, WA, 6010 The Goods Shed Cnr Shenton Road and Claremont Crescent, Claremont, WA, 6010 T: 08 9226 2799 E: gallery@form.net.au Portrait of Doreen Chapman by Tobias Titz, 2012. All other photographs in this document are by Bewley Shaylor, 2016.