Our Fellas: A Story to Be Told

Station work. Landscape. Hunting. Camp life. Sacred sites. Ancestral beings. Contemporary perspectives alongside the codified imagery of Ngurra [home Country, camp]. Deep Country where multiple Dreaming tracks intersect, and where important stories originate.

Welcome to Our Fellas: A Story to Be Told, a powerful selection of paintings by the men of Spinifex Hill Studio.

Not only does each painting have a ‘story to be told,’ but this exhibition also gives the opportunity to showcase the important collective story of a group of 12 remarkable individuals, whose diverse artistic paths happen to have converged on Spinifex Hill Studio, the only art centre dedicated to supporting the practices of Aboriginal artists in the wider Hedland area.

South and Port Hedland have always been regular gathering places for people coming in from remote communities, to attend to personal or family business, education or health. Accordingly, the Studio has always welcomed and worked with individuals from a variety of different language groups. Many of the artists—male and female—painting with the Studio are geographically remote from their ancestral lands. Physical distance, however, has never hindered the intensity and detail in the work of those whose practice focuses on their or their forebears’ Ngurra. And by highlighting for the first time the art of the male artists associated with the Studio, Our Fellas encapsulates the power and range of that cultural and artistic connection.

The exhibition draws together the work of men who represent an extraordinary diversity: of birthplace, language, lived experience, cultural references, artistic sources, and techniques. The artists belong to language groups including Mangala, Juwarling, and Warnman; Manjilyjarra, Nyangumarta, Martu Wangka; Walmajarri, Nyikana, and Banjiyma; Warlpiri and Pintupi: language groups spanning vast swathes of Country, from the coast north of Hedland, south and east inland past the Gibson Desert to the Tanami Desert, and northwards through the Great Sandy Desert to the Kimberley.

It’s hardly surprising then that the artworks showcased in Our Fellas represent correspondingly wide-ranging cultural and artistic perspectives.

The exhibition’s eldest participant, Warnman man Minyawe Miller, was born in the remote area of the Pilbara’s Karlamilyi in the 1930s. One of the last pujiman [nomadic desert dwelling] people to leave the desert, Miller’s powerful canvases reference the complex striations of the tuwa [sand hill] Country he roamed as a boy. He uses a vibrant palette to represent kuka [meat], and the hunting that would have sustained him, his sister, fellow artist Kanu (Karnu) Nancy Taylor (dec.) and their extended family during their travels.

Encryption lies at the heart of the work of another senior Manjilyjarra artist and Law man, Phillip Simpson, who paints Country around Kunawarritji. At first glimpse, Simpson’s artworks appear grounded in ochres and rusts and browns: earthy, almost sombre backdrops to labyrinthine, symmetrical networks of dots. The canvases seem to transmit a coiled energy; the dot patterns radiate arcs akin to magnetic fields. Looking closer, one discovers these patterns are picked out in a more expansive palette―of primary colours, pinks, greens, oranges and purples―yet the overall impact is still of containment and selectivity. As if embodying the restricted nature of the narratives and Country to which they allude, these works hold, and hold back, their stories.

Likewise, the artworks of Warlpiri/Pintupi man Donovan Jungala Brown are precise and almost diagrammatic, yet never explicit―in their representation of place and story. His painting Warlu & Ngupa (2021) depicts ‘water and fire dreaming. My Grandfather dreaming story. Central Western Australia.’ In this painting, Brown’s flame-coloured brush strokes conjure an intricate geometry, apparently of rectangles. And yet, after a while, other shapes emerge to offer a different perspective on the story. The same sense of purpose and confidence with colour and shape is evident in Brown’s other paintings, and in his use of flowing lines and circles. At first glance, apparently static and monochromatic. And then, the story unfolds.

Martu man Derrick Butt uses a different kind of visual ‘vocabulary’ in his shimmering abstracts of waterholes in his grandmother’s Country, Kulyakartu, near the Percival Lakes in the Great Sandy Desert. These are works of exquisite intensity: simultaneously aerial perspectives of land and yet also reflections night skies in their profuse yet delicate constellations of dot work, with brooding waterholes seeming to bloom out of nebulae.

Another Martu artist, Paul Thomas, has one painting in Our Fellas, and it is a meditative landscape of the towering rock face and tranquil waters of Carawine Gorge, on Nyamal Country near Marble Bar. Thomas belongs to a family of acclaimed artists: his mother, senior Martu artist Maywokka Chapman, his aunts (also senior Martu artists), and his sister Doreen Chapman regularly paint with Spinifex Hill Studio. However, as a figurative landscape artist often inspired by places outside his ancestral lands, Thomas’ practice differs from those of his female relatives.

The Kimberley inspires two of the younger artists in the exhibition: Walmajarri/ Nyikana/ Nyangumarta brothers Zenith Gardiner and Gideon Gardiner, who were born respectively in Derby and Looma. Zenith uses a figurative style to paint luminous waterfalls and lake scenery of places that are significant to him, often beneath night-skies saturated with stars and portrayals of story. While still employing a figurative approach, Gideon’s medium and technique are radically different: he likes to record experiences of Lore, hunting and initiation using a bold, graphic, comic-book aesthetic, with pen, pencil and ink on paper, rather than paint.

Both men were encouraged to make art by their father, the celebrated artist Nyaparu (William) Gardiner (1943–2018), who produced more than 350 paintings and drawings at Spinifex Hill Studio during the last four years of his life. Some of these pieces feature in Our Fellas. A Nyangumarta/ Warnman/ Manjilyjarra man who grew up in the aftermath of the famous Pilbara Aboriginal Pastoral Workers’ Strike of 1946–49, Mr Gardiner’s distinctive portraiture of his station worker contemporaries in the Pilbara and the Kimberley, and his depictions of Strike camp memories have attracted critical acclaim as well as many awards, including a major posthumous prize at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in 2019. He is regarded as one of the most important artists to come out of north-western Australia during this era, and his work is in the collections of many national institutions, including the Western Australian Museum, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

The work of the remaining three artists in Our Fellas illustrates a versatility and spirit of experimentation characteristic of so many of the artists practising at Spinifex Hill Studio. Nyangumarta artist Kelvin Allen’s paintings are full of movement, animated by exuberant swirls and daubs of colour, and by the creatures this loose, gestural style depicts: perentie and emu. Mangala/ Juwarling/ Warnman artist Alphonse Bullen is a landscape artist who also has a striking approach to portraiture, as evidenced by his arresting renditions of fellow Studio artists Phillip Simpson and Mulyatingki Marney.

The youngest participant in the exhibition, Banjiyma man Layne Dhu-Dickie, is perhaps also one of the Studio’s best known artists and one of its most prolific storytellers. Dhu-Dickie was born in South Hedland in 2004, and began experimenting with graphic comic-style drawing when he was barely a teenager, after coming across his Dad’s Phantom and Spiderman comics. Dhu-Dickie developed his own super-hero, Captain Hedland, and created a series of comic book stories around this character. In each, Captain Hedland battles a particular social issue, like drugs and alcohol (personified by the villain Crave), lack of education (The Fisherman) and bullying (The Bush Mechanic). Dhu-Dickie’s artwork has been collected by the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Janet Holmes à Court Collection.

In presenting the artwork of the Spinifex Hill Studio men, Our Fellas is certainly sharing a proud and important story.

Mags Webster FORM, January 2023