The JGM Review Vol. III

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N THIS EDITION OF THE JGM REVIEW, THE CONTRIBUTORS EXAMINE SOME OF THE GALLERY’S

RECENT EXHIBITIONS. IT IS THE AIM OF THESE CONVERSATIONS AND CURATORIAL COMMENTARIES TO CONTEXTUALISE THESE SHOWS FOR OUR FRIENDS, VISITORS AND CLIENTS. ON THE OCCASION OF AAK KEENKANAM: FROM THE BEGINNING, BEGINNING , ANTONIA CRICHTON-BROWN EXPLORES THE INTEGRATION OF RITUALISTIC PRACTICES WITH CONTEMPORARY ARTISTIC EXPRESSION IN AURUKUN. THIS CONNECTION BETWEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION IS DISCUSSED FURTHER IN A CONVERSATION BETWEEN CRICHTONBROWN, GABRIEL WATERMAN AND KEITH WIKMUNEA. IN ANTICIPATION OF HIS UPCOMING EXHIBITION, ON THE ROAD AGAIN, AGAIN , JUAN BOLIVAR DISCUSSES HIS IDEAS AND METHODS WITH JULIUS KILLERBY. KATHERINE JONES RA THEN REFLECTS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TOM NORRIS’ CERAMIC VESSELS AND HIS TWO-DIMENSIONAL WALL-MOUNTED WORKS. FINALLY, IN AN ESSAY PRODUCED ON THE OCCASION OF OUR APRIL EXHIBITION, ÖMIE ÖMIE,, JULIUS THEN WRITES ABOUT THE CROSS-CULTURAL IDEAS EXPRESSED IN BARKCLOTH DESIGNS FROM ORO PROVINCE IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA.

- JENNIFER GUERRINI MARALDI

Dance at Duharenu Village.

Photo by Brennan King, courtesy of Ömie Artists.

CONTRIBUTORS KEITH WIKMUNEA Keith Wikmunea is a senior artist at The Wik & Kugu Arts Centre. His paintings are of Country in Kencharang, south of Aurukun, and his sculptural work consists predominantly of the Ku’ (Dog), a subject for which he and The Wik & Kugu Arts Centre have become renowned in recent years. This year, he was the recipient of the prestigious Telstra NATSIAA Award. Through his paintings and sculptures, Wikmunea works to further Wik art and culture. He is passionate about passing on his creative and cultural knowledge to future generations.

ANTONIA CRICHTON-BROWN Antonia Crichton-Brown is a Gallery Assistant and copywriter at JGM Gallery. Crichton-Brown is completing her undergraduate degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, focusing her studies on the Aboriginal art industry in Australia, participatory art, Indigenous land rights, and postcolonial thought.

JULIUS KILLERBY

JUAN BOLIVAR

Julius Killerby is an artist and the Associate Director of JGM Gallery London. He has previously held positions at The Australian Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Metro Gallery, Scott Livesey Gallery and Flinders Lane Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. Within the context of his own practice, he has exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Art Gallery of Ballarat & Geelong Gallery, amongst other spaces. His work focuses on the psychological ripple effects of certain cultural and societal transformations.

Juan Bolivar is a Venezuelan-born British artist and curator. His paintings investigate the tension between meaning and form through reappropriating and reconfiguring the styles of formalism and abstraction. He often tethers his love of music with critical gestures towards Modernist geometries, creating intertextual connections with popular culture references to question signifiers and language.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOL. III

KATHERINE JONES RA

5 Artful Stages: Wik Performance & Art

Katherine Jones’ artistic practice is underpinned by drawing and painting, and concluded in multilayered painterly prints which bring together disparate narratives in hyper-real or folkloric spaces.

Perceptions of safety and danger are often described using archetypal motifs such as a house, flower, sun or tree.

Antonia Crichton-Brown examines the work of six artists from The Wik & Kugu Arts Centre, exhibited in Aak Keenkanam: From The Beginning (5 July - 2 September 2023). This is followed by a discussion between Crichton-Brown, Keith Wikmunea, and Gabriel Waterman.

After a BA at Cambridge School of Art she completed her MA at Camberwell College of Art in 2003 and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art Printmaking at Middlesex University as well as a visiting lecturer at universities and colleges across the UK. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her work and has undertaken major residencies, including at Eton College, Winchester College, Rabley Drawing Centre UK and Kloster Bentlager in Germany.

17 Juan Bolivar In Conversation On the occasion of On The Road Again (13 September - 21 October), an exhibition of new paintings by Juan Bolivar, Julius Killerby interviews the Venezuelan-born British artist in his North London studio.

29 Significant Works From JGM Gallery’s Collection | Alma Kalaju Webou & Nyarapayi Giles Antonia Crichton-Brown examines the work of Alma Kalaju Webou & Nyarapayi Giles.

32 Tom Norris | Also Rises

GABRIEL WATERMAN

Katherine Jones RA interprets Tom Norris’ work, as seen in the artist’s recent exhibition at JGM Gallery, Also Rises (31 May - 1 July 2023).

Gabriel Waterman has an academic background in the social sciences and cultural restoration initiatives. He has worked with the Woyan-min Biocultural project, teaching audio-visual skills to youth to record and maintain the language and culture of Aurukun’s Elders. Waterman has a strong understanding of Wik-Mungkan, the Wik & Kugu region’s lingua franca, having lived and worked in Aurukun for many years. He works to strengthen the bonds between language, cultural heritage and art in Aurukun.

36 Ömie Barkcloths Julius Killerby examines creation myths and iconography in an essay produced on the occasion of Ömie (19 April - 27 May), an exhibition of nioge (barkcloths) created by seventeen artists from Oro Province in Papua New Guinea.

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ARTFUL STAGES: WIK PERFORMANCE & ART

Opposite: Archival photo - Traditional ceremony in Aurukun, 1962.

Image courtesy of The Wik & Kugu Arts Centre.

ANTONIA CRICHTON-BROWN CONSIDERS METHODS OF INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION IN WIK

Below: Alair Pambegan, Winchanam Body Paint Design, 2023, earth pigments on linen, 200cm x 108cm.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

CULTURE. THIS TEXT WAS PRODUCED ON THE OCCASION OF JGM GALLERY ’S 2023 SUMMER SHOWCASE OF SIX ARTISTS FROM THE WIK & KUGU ARTS CENTRE, AAK KEENKANAM: FROM THE BEGINNING. CRICHTON-BROWN EXAMINES THE TRADITIONAL INITIATIVE AND DANCE PRACTICES OF CAPE YORK’S WIK PEOPLES IN TANDEM WITH COLONIAL HISTORIES. SHE CONSIDERS THE EXTENT TO WHICH WIK CONTEMPORARY PAINTING AND SCULPTURE FUNCTION AS EDUCATIONAL DEVICES, WHICH ASSERT CUSTODIANSHIP AND RIGHTFUL LAND INHERITANCE.

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HEATRICS AND PERFORMANCE have long been foundational to the Wik peoples’ traditional remit. Ceremonies assemble dance, song and sculpture in a collaborative and poetic model, which activate and make Wik cultural heritage accessible to be passed on through Elders to a younger generation. The videographic documentation of Wik Bora initiation rituals was pioneered by Ian Dunlop in his participatory film, Dances at Aurukun 1962.

Several totemic ceremonies, performed by Apalech, Wanam, Puch, Sara and Winchanam Clan groups, were recorded for archiving and distribution. The filming of Dances at Aurukun came at a time when Western cultural barbarism was in caustic effect and the socio-cultural makeup of Cape York’s Wik peoples was suffering disturbance and change as a result. A history of settler-colonial oppression, founded on the falsification of Australia as “terra nullius” or “empty land”, effaced the presence of Wik peoples through their forced relocation from traditional homelands, pastoralist occupancy, mass killings and corporate extraction.

The Wik peoples, by nature of their immemorial belonging to Country, dating back to the Pleistocene period at the very least, were staunch resisters to the politics of erasure. Their successful repulsion of the Dutch invasion (1606), the first European encounter with Aboriginal peoples in Australia, is still recounted via oral histories. The Wik also fought to defend their native title in The Wik Peoples v The State of Queensland & Ors case (1993 - 1996), cited as one of the most significant victories against the extinguishment of native title by pastoralist and mining tenancies (Stevenson, 1996). This precipitated the Howard government’s amendments to the Native Title Act (1993), known as the '10-point plan'. On the steps of the High Court, after the favourable ruling was announced, Aurukun Elder and Wik activist, Gladys Tybingoompa, performed a ceremonial Malpa dance. Her celebration of the Wik Decision with a land-based performance memorialised the event and attracted extensive media attention (Shrubsall, 2002).

The reproduction of images picturing Tybingoompa dancing is indicative of the great potency with which performance practices are imbued. The beauty of performance may lie in its temporality on site, however, capturing the action in video or photography seals its emotive power in perpetuity. Perhaps the potential of performance lies in inspiring others towards like initiatives, comparable to that which Tybingoompa commemorated. Indeed, the Um Toch (Dry Swamps) ceremonies preserved in Dunlop’s film are thought to have motivated the commercial production of contemporary fine art in Aurukun (1990s). As Keith Wikmunea has said, the Wik people's connection to Aak Puul (Father's Tribal Country or Homeland) is expressed through cultural performance.

Dances at Aurukun opens with panning shots of men in ceremonial attire who cleave through tree trunks with robust axes, transitioning to scenes where these cuttings are carved into ritual sculpture and painted in earth pigments. Showcased by the exhibiting artists in Aak Keenkanam: From The Beginning are a collection of Ku’ (Dog) sculptures, which mimic those used in ceremonies. These sculptures are now produced as secularised works, depicting the Ku’ that, in Apalech retellings, travelled from the Northern Territory to the Cape York Peninsula and, on entering the Knox River, transformed into a Nyiingkuchen (Freshwater Shark). Other Wik histories allude to notions of transformation, such as the Apalech Brothers who were born from two halves of a bitten taipan snake. The metamorphosis of the Ku’ resonates with a view that transition and adaptation are important concepts for organising cultural engagement. For instance, Aurukun participants in the Old way – New way scheme (2002) produced wood carvings to be cast in bronze and aluminium, reorienting the aesthetics of Aurukun sculpture through industrial modern materials (Butler, 2010).

Alair Pambegan’s Winchanam Body Paint Design, a key work in this exhibition, situates the body paint design usually employed in Wik ceremonies on canvas.

He carries this ideographic form over from the initial models of his father, Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan Jr, described as a “culture warrior” in the title of Ursula McConnel’s monograph (McConnel, 2008). The ochre red and white geometric composition, filled in part with a rich, charcoal black, is laid flat against the surface of the canvas. A lack of spatial depth in this work endows it with a fabriclike quality, emphasising tactility and utility while welcoming the participation of the viewer. The partitions and ladder-like arrangement pair with the visual attributes of the Ikeleth clay site, where the Wik people quarry pigments traditionally used in Clan body painting and now in fine art. North of Aurukun, this colossal wall of alternating horizontal strata harbours natural Molp' (Red Clay) and Wu' (White Clay). The combination of Ikeleth's appearance with the historic use of its pigments in body paint designs and Pambegan's transmission

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of these designs to canvas demonstrates the work's ecological praxis.

At two-metres tall, Winchanam Body Paint Design is human-like in scale and envelops the viewer in its space, which is both emblematic of Ikeleth and Wik people's ceremonial grounds. Pambegan's painting therefore concentrates and synthesises his engagement with Wik Country: traditional labour practices of collecting raw materials for art making and the connection between land and body, demonstrated by initiative performance rites.

The collaboration of Pambegan's painting with those of Keith Wikmunea, Flora Woolla and Leigh Namponan at JGM Gallery simulates an immersive and vital ecosystem. These works transform the spaces they inhabit into stages where viewers, as actors, move among the sites on Wik Country, which these paintings represent.

The Ku’ sculptures are also players on this stage, bringing us into the narrative of the Ancestral beings who moved through this same landscape. Vivid colours enliven their wooden base, alluding to an emanating lifeful force and the vibrance of the culture they stand for. In this way, the works are much more than plain representation.

Channelling a collective connection to Country and culture, Wik & Kugu art becomes an educational tool, engaging the audience in both the Wik's political histories and knowledge systems.

As with Wik & Kugu art, Bora rituals are also zones of transmission through transition. The process of initiating young men into manhood through kinaesthetic learning in dance attests to this (Kenny, 2012).

In Malp Kee’an: Art & Ceremony in Aurukun - a film which the Wik & Kugu Arts Centre co-produced alongside the Woyan-Min Biocultural Project - passages from the 1962 Bora are followed by Keith Wikmunea securing white cockatoo and gallah sculptures onto a blackened arborescent structure. His grandchildren watch while he explains the significance of the former as his father’s totem and the latter as his mother’s. There is here a parallel to be drawn between the knowledge passed on in ceremonies and that which is now relayed through the display of contemporary art. Anna Kenny, in reference to Bora rituals, states that they are reinforcements of “people’s rights under their common laws and customs” (Kenny, 2012, p. 148). This reading can be expanded to this exhibition, which reinforces the Wik people's extensive historic and spiritual past to its viewership.

The artistic innovation of Wik & Kugu artists has reinvigorated, entertained and renewed cultural life to an enormous degree in Aurukun. The arts movement marks a metamorphosis of Wik traditions, where the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next has found its footing in contemporary modes of production.

The mediums for transmission may take shape as new metonymic devices, but the stories communicated through them do not change, being as they are Aak Keenkanam (From The Beginning).

REFERENCES: Butler, S. & UQ Art Museum. (2010) Before Time Today: Reinventing Tradition in Aurukun Aboriginal Art. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

Stevenson, B. (1996). ‘The Wik Decision and After’, Research Bulletin 4(97).

Kenny, A. ‘The “Society” at Bora Ceremonies’, Oceania 82(2), 129151.

McConnel, U. & Andrew Baker Art Dealer. (2008) Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan Jr: Culture Warrior. Brisbane: Andrew Baker Art Dealer.

Shrubsall, G.M. (2002) The Dancing Body Makes Sense of Place, [Master’s dissertation, UWS Nepean, School of Contemporary Arts: Dance].

Opposite: (Left) Lex Namponan, Ku’, 2023, earth pigments on wood, 44cm x 24cm x 13cm, (middle) Leigh Namponan, Apalech - Saltwater Country 1/2, 2023, earth pigments on linen, 197.5cm x 106.5cm, (right) Leigh Namponan, Apalech - Saltwater Country 2/2, 2023, earth pigments on linen, 197.5cm x 106.5cm.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

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Keith Wikmunea in conversation with

Above: Small Archer River - Alair Pambegan’s Country, 2021.

Image courtesy of Gabriel Waterman.

Gabe Waterman & Antonia Crichton-Brown

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ONVENTIONAL HISTORICAL RESEARCH, through its predominant written mode – a textual not an aural instrument – tends to produce an abstraction from the daily life of those whose culture is the under study. The hand of an omniscient narrator, dubbed the historian, often guides the reader through the lives of others in the third person, without adequate consideration given to the hegemony of ideologies reproduced in their own voice (Portelli, 1991). Often, an emphasis is placed not so much on how people feel, experience and create meaning from events and memory as conduits of culture, but on constructing an empirical understanding of a progressive line stamped across time to explain and document specific cultural phenomena. This can result in an anti-empathetical approach. In a time where our knowledge of global happenings is cherry picked from a dense foliage of news headlines, the voices of individuals on the ground often become superimposed and sometimes even lost. Oral sources make opportunities for the local point of view to connect with the global, scientific view. It is on this cross-cultural and experiential meeting ground that a multitude of perspectives and varied socio-linguistic origins are related and undergo a process of self-recognition. The dominance of an external narrator as a mouthpiece is challenged through collective participation and dialogue: the interviewer becomes a subject of the discourse as much as those whom they are investigating. Listening to an audio recording also gives greater space for the receiver’s imagination to construct its own bespoke meaning from the undulance, tone, rhythm and velocity in the speaker’s delivery (McHugh, 2016). Oral histories can be productive to a culture’s persistence, serving as educational resources to an upcoming generation for its continuation and development. If language and art-making practices are interlocking puzzle pieces of a cultural landscape at large, accumulative documentation and access to the two are vital for the internal preservation and promotion of that culture, as well as its wider understanding, appreciation and politicisation. Oral expression as a means of passing on knowledge has a rooted and inextricable place in Wik culture. The following transcript, while being a textual source with the potential to distort the emphases of the spoken word, documents a conversation between the senior Wik-Mungkan/Wik-Alken artist, Keith Wikmunea, Wik & Kugu Arts Centre Manager, Gabe Waterman, and myself, JGM Gallery researcher and copywriter, Antonia Crichton-Brown. Wikmunea was brought up from birth in Aurukun and works from The Wik & Kugu Arts Centre, furthering Wik art and culture in his paintings and sculptural schemes. Through his work and word, Wikmunea passes on his artistic and cultural knowledge to Aurukun’s younger generations.

In 2023, Wikmunea was awarded the Telstra NATSIAA (National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards) Art Award, the longest running and richest art award in Australia. Waterman has an academic background in the social sciences and cultural restoration initiatives. He has worked with the Woyan-Min biocultural project, teaching audio-visual skills to youth to record and maintain the language and culture of Aurukun’s elders. Waterman has a strong understanding of Wik-Mungkan, the Wik & Kugu region’s lingua franca, having lived and worked in Aurukun for many years. He works to strengthen the bonds between language, cultural heritage and art in Aurukun. I am completing my undergraduate degree at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, focusing my studies on the Aboriginal art industry in Australia, the politics of territorialisation, Indigenous land rights, and postcolonial thought. I composed the following questions in JGM Gallery's London space, sent them to Waterman in Aurukun, who then posed them to Wikmunea and provided his own responses where appropriate. The recording of Waterman and Wikmunea’s dialogue is available upon request from The Wik & Kugu Arts Centre. This transcript is not intended to replace it but is suggested as an intertextual resource.

ANTONIA CRICHTON-BROWN Let’s start with your thoughts and feelings concerning the artists of Wik & Kugu Art Centre’s first international exhibition at JGM Gallery in London. Keith, as a senior Wik-Alken artist, what does having your works exhibited on an international stage mean to you?

ACB It sounds as though the Arts Centre’s place in Aurukun extends well beyond the provision of studio space and materials to the artists. Gabe, to what extent does your role as manager extend to maintaining Wik cultural life and responsibilities in Aurukun?

KEITH WIKMUNEA Having my work overseas for the first time is very important to me. My family are proud of me and our culture. I mostly carve and paint my traditional Country called Kencharang. All the lines and dots represent this Country. It’s good to show the world that we have our own style here in Aurukun and I’m happy to be sharing this with people from overseas now.

GW As a manager, my responsibility is to support the maintenance of Wik & Kugu cultural heritage within the context of Aurukun’s rich arts heritage. I do this collaboratively with the artists and their families. The production of highend contemporary visual art has been a focus within my role. Over the past 10 years, the quality of the art produced at the Centre has waned, resulting from a lack of corporate knowledge not being transmitted to on-coming managers. The wheel has been continuously reinvented. Luckily for me, I was able to engage in specialist support from Guy and Gina Allain, long-time supporters of Aurukun arts and culture who had much success working with senior artists in partnership with gallerists such as Martin Brown Contemporary, Sydney and Andrew Baker Fine Art, Brisbane.

ACB Could you describe for me, Keith, how your carvings and paintings evidence the cultural responsibilities implicit in representing your Country?

KW The old people used to protect their Poison Grounds (Sacred Places).

They had a responsibility of looking after the Land and the Water. Our Poison Places are forbidden areas. People can’t just move around our Country without the proper permission. A Traditional Owner must place underarm smell on anyone that is new to the area. By doing that, people won’t get sick when they visit my Land. This is one of my responsibilities, to keep people safe and protected.

My work, and that of the other Wik & Kugu artists, is tied up with important knowledge that was handed down to us by our old people. It is our responsibility to keep this knowledge alive by handing it to our own children and grandchildren.

I’m proud of doing my artwork because it gives me the opportunity to show how beautiful our Country is. I can’t paint or carve another person’s Country because it is not right to tell other people’s stories for them. We have lots of Poison Places and Story Places that need to be protected. This is one of my main responsibilities I have as a Wik-Alken man. When I was young, I used to travel with my parents to a place called Kencharang and Ti-tree. We lived on this Country for extended periods of time. My parents showed me our Sacred Places and taught us that we need to be careful when visitors turn up. To keep them safe, I need to put under arm smell on them so that they don’t get sick.

KW My sculptures and paintings represent the Land where I come from.

Sharing it in London is another way for me to share my culture with new people.

They can look at where I come from by seeing the ochres that I collect from the saltpan, for example. They will also learn about the Water and the Land that my people have belonged to since the beginning. It’s also good for my family to see this exhibition happen because they are more proud of our culture.

ACB Gabe, as the Art Centre’s manager, could you tell me a little about your experiences at Wik & Kugu working with and for the artists?

GABE WATERMAN Since 2020, I have managed the Wik & Kugu Art Centre for the community in Aurukun. I have worked alongside senior Wik & Kugu artists to develop a revitalised arts and cultural heritage program. More women have started attending the Centre now with exciting work being produced by Flora Woolla, Vera Koomeeta, Devena Wikmunea and Janet Koongotema. Portrayed in the mainstream media as a troubled community, Aurukun is, however, a wellspring of creativity that draws on a highly connected cultural heritage with unbroken ties to the Ancestral past. I have enjoyed working alongside Wik & Kugu artists to make sure their heritage continues into the future.

ACB Is there some holistic narrative which only both sculpture and painting displayed in tandem can disclose?

GW I think that the two are complementary. On the one hand, there is the rich cultural heritage of carved animal totems that Aurukun is well known for, and on the other hand, the emergence of women’s painting within the last 15 years is another way for the stories of Country to find expression within a new contemporary context. The narratives that come from the tribal Lands of Wik & Kugu peoples will always remain, in a sense, whole.

ACB I’m interested to discuss whether removing these works from the artists’ Country has potential for the meaning the works produce to be interrupted or misinterpreted through a novel, diverse audience participation. Keith, how does transmitting these works from an immediate and local context in Aurukun to a London gallery space change their meaning, if at all?

“I hope to share my art practice and culture with a wider audience. I like working on a big scale and believe this is the future for me and my art. I want to give people an unforgettable experience and understanding when it comes to my people, culture and language.”

ACB What response do you hope exhibiting your works at JGM Gallery will stimulate from its audience in London?

swick Street Gallery exhibition. The aim of the exhibition was to highlight the creativity that is inherent in Wik & Kugu storytelling. The colours used in Janet Koongotema’s acrylic paintings are another way that Wik & Kugu women show their connection to the Land. Acrylic does not diminish the story that the artist is trying to share.

ACB Keith, can you tell me a little more about the relationship between Wik animal sculpture and ceremony?

KW In the Mission days, the Clans were still going through Bora (Initiation). The Clans would get together and collect the ochre and timber. They would make their carvings separately. Apalech would make theirs, Winchanam would make theirs. They would get together and dance. You can see this in the 1962 Dances at the Dry Swamps in Aurukun. You can see this today as well. Back in the day, when we had tin houses and bark houses, they would dance in the Mission with all the Clans sitting down with their carvings. In 1962, the Clans moved the Bora ground to Um Toch (Dry Swamps). They would have their own carved things like dogs, crocodiles, sharks, Minh Wuk (Flying Fox). The Clans used to dance with their carvings. Winchanam (Wik-Mungkan inland-speaking Clan) is the Bonefish (Minh Walkalan) and Apalech with the Ku’ (Dog) and Shark, and so on with the other Clans. The carvings are connected to Puulwuy (Our Country).

KW The stories that belong to our artworks will always stay the same because they are from the beginning. We will continue to use the timber and ochre that we collect on Country to tell these stories. The meaning of Aak Keenkanam can be understood as a timeless place that doesn’t change. The artwork that has been created for this exhibition reflects this meaning. The only thing that changes is the fact that these artworks have travelled so far away from their homelands.

These stories are ancient and timeless. They don’t change.

ACB How important is it to preserve the original intended meaning of these works at such a great geographic distance from the location of their production? How is best to achieve this?

KW One way to do this is by respecting our culture and by educating yourself on the art and the stories. We support the public to engage deeply with Wik & Kugu culture through visual art. The film that was produced for the exhibition is made in our Wik-Mungkan language. We translated it into English subtitles, but the audience can still hear our First Language and the way we interpret our culture to our own community.

The film presents a historic context to the ceremonial heritage of today’s contemporary art forms belonging to the five Clans living in the community.

ACB I noticed that in 2022 at Brunswick Street Gallery, there was an interesting curatorial decision to integrate Ku’ sculpture and painted canvases together.

It had an intimate and conversational tone to it. Keith and Gabe, could you share with me your thoughts on the dialogue forged between sculpture and painting at Wik & Kugu and how the two forms relate to one another?

ACB

How are they collected?

Above: Keith Wikmunea, Piintal - Apalech Saltpan Country, 2023, earth pigment on linen, 200cm x 131cm. Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

ACB Keith, I’d like to ask you about the stances of Ku’ sculptures. The assertive raised tails and heads of Bruce Bell’s works contrast to the more quietus and stable attributes of your sculptures. What are your considerations in the sculpting process of your works?

GW The painting and sculpture is an ancient practice in Wik & Kugu cultures, so it wasn’t a totally new thing to combine these two forms in the Brun-

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KW When I paint on my Ku’ carvings, it is in reference to my Country. The Ku’ is right across our Territories. The coastal Ku’s have unusual patterning and they can sometimes be pure white or pure black. We sometimes paint our sculptures the same way as this.

ACB I understand that you may not be able to speak for Alair Pambegan, however, I was interested in Winchanam Body Paint Design and its bisecting lines with negative space infilled in black, reminiscent of Mondrian’s Modernist grids in primary colours. His desire was said to be communicating something essential about movement and rhythm. It seems to me that, if Pambegan’s Design was painted on a human body, it would divide the figure’s anatomy into blocks with connecting lines much like I see in your Ku’ sculptures, Keith. Could you expand on the relationship between the body and these designs. What does this design tell us about Wik culture and the relationship between Aak Puul (Homeland), body, artistry and motion?

ACB What do you consider to be symbolic about this shift of paint from a human support onto a Modern material support?

KW Pigments are collected in a number of ways. Black is harvested from the coals of beach hibiscus, yellow is dug from the saltpans which can also be cooked into red through an oxidisation process, and white is collected from the Arafura red & white cliffs on the coast.

KW The body paint came first. This identifies each Clan from the other. The painting of totems was also part of this culture and Lore. Body paint is representative of the Land from which the Clans come. Each Clan has their own body paint designs. These include particular designs that represent a Ritual Complex which includes many increase-ceremonies related to the Land and the Sea.

ACB In your sculptures, Keith, you seem to accentuate the anatomy of the figure through their painted surfaces. Is there something particular about the Ku’ narrative that you seek to demonstrate in your work that differs from other approaches?

KW The body paint designs are sacred. We call this “Ngench Thayan.” These designs are from the beginning, Aak Keenkanam. They don’t change because they are from a timeless place that is deeply spiritual.

Each Clan’s unique designs represent the Country that they come from.

For example, my Clan, Apalech, represents the Clear Water.

ACB Keith, can you tell me about the pigments in your work?

KW My colour choices represent my Country like the saltpans, lagoons, rivers and timber Country.

talking but I step in to bring the shape into existence. Each artist freely expresses themselves and the totems they carve. We work within our creative abilities to produce sculptures that highlight the living context of our culture. The movements of the Ku’ reflect this creativity and life.

KW The shift to modern material is a response to the contemporary practice of visual arts production. Since the 1990’s, Wik people have drawn on their cultural identities in the creation of art. This is a new platform that allows us to assert our ties to Country and Clan.

ACB From my understanding, the production of Wik commercial art started in the 1990s and The Wik & Kugu Arts Centre was established in 2001 to service five Aurukun Clan groups: Apalech, Puch, Sara, Wanam and Winchanam. The Wik Peoples v The State of Queensland & Ors (1996) has been cited as one of the most significant victories in native title superseding pastoral and mining claims to Wik and Wika Waya lands. Peter Sutton has said that “when the Wik people are threatened from outside, they abandon their usual fragmentation and conflict and band together like a solid rock.” Keith, would you describe your work as political? How far does contemporary Wik art correspond to expressing Wik sovereignty?

I work with the natural style of timber. I let the timber do most of the 12

KW The art that we produce comes from our cultural identity. We are Traditional Owners for particular regions of Land. This is a responsibility that each man and women has been given. We stand up for our Country. This is what we must do. We represent our Puulwuy and stand up and protect our Awa’ (Story Places).

ACB Keith, I was really struck by the translucent layer of pure white in your work, Piintal – Apalech Saltpan Country, which reminded me of the salt sheet left when mineral water evaporates and its salt content dries. It seems as though there is a visual correspondence between the literal texture of the landscape you paint and achieving the same feeling through paint. I notice a similar feature in Leigh Namponan’s Apalech Saltwater Country diptych. Is conjuring a feeling of being in Country important to your work?

KW Yes, it is. When I paint my Country, I show people the special connection we have to our waterways and forests. Our old people are still in our Country. We hear them singing to us through the birds and other animals that live there.

ACB How far do achieving the qualities of texture, layering and depth in your work further your own land relations and your understanding of your cultural inheritance?

KW The layers and texture that I paint are from my experience of walking and living in our Country. When I paint, I can show people a new way to see the Country.

ACB Flora Woolla’s Thukal (Love River) is a truly mesmeric piece. The texture to me seems to come through her use of white earth pigment in gradated thickness, evoking shimmering water. In some parts of Woolla’s painting the pigment is applied opaquely and in others, with a lighter gesture. I get such a great sense of drifting and moving through the image, as if in a state of contemplation. I wonder about the collaborative aspects of the river’s ecosystem that are represented in Woolla’s work. Gabe, to what extent is Woolla’s work about the symbiosis between the water’s ebbs and flow and the bush tucker which its tides reveal? Do the pockets of white pigment represent mud crabs and shells under the river’s surface?

GW Flora’s work is compositionally simple with her patterns taking the form of the low tide in the mangroves at Thukal (Love River). The white pigment shows the sandy mudflats that appear after the water runs out to the sea before re-entering and flooding the area once again. There is plenty of bush tucker like mud shells, mud crabs and mangrove oysters that can be collected for eating.

ACB To me, I look at much of the work produced at Wik & Kugu as representing the fluidity, mutability, adaptation and accumulation of Wik culture making headway into, and reorienting, the contemporary art world, seen in the vibrant fusion of the aesthetics of a Wik modernity and a Western industrial modernity.

Would you say this is an accurate assessment?

“Wik culture is ancient.

The art is tied to Land, Language and Clan identity.

These things are at once unchangeable and yet fluid with the many new ways they find expression.“ - Gabriel Waterman.

GW Wik culture is ancient. The art is tied to Land, Language and Clan identity. These things are at once unchangeable and yet fluid with the many new ways they find expression. Art is just another way for Wik & Kugu people to express their cultural heritage. The introduction of carpentry tools and techniques in the Mission Times has given the current cohort of male artists the essential tools needed to enter the contemporary art world. The production of art provides an avenue for the artists and their families to make a sustainable living through their work. It also helps the culture find a new context in today’s globalised world without departing from the Traditions handed down to them from the old people. It is an excellent way to maintain part of the cultural heritage belonging to the five Clans living in Aurukun. The culture doesn’t just change. It finds resonance in new contemporary modes of production and storytelling. The Arts Centre has provided a platform for this ancient knowledge to continue by being passed down to the next generation.

ACB Keith, how has your work developed since you began your art making practice? What would you consider as a defining moment that contributed to your own understanding of your work and what you achieve through your process? I’m interested to hear where you see your work going and what transitions and emphases we can expect to see from the works you make next.

KW In the early days, I was making spears, wommera’s (spear throwers) and firesticks. I was taught how to collect the right materials to make these things by my late father. I know how to make all the essential weapons to hunt and live off the Land just as my father and his father did. In 1996, I stepped into the Wik & Kugu Arts Centre for the very first time. I carved my first ever carving which was a white cockatoo, my big totem from my mother’s side. I carved it using Yuk Thanchal (Milkwood), a timber that is preferred by all the artists and is what is used with all the Ku’s. After making my first carving, I decided to explore my other totems and stories. That is why you see me today carving cockatoos in big trees, camp dogs, galahs and plover birds. I’ve just been selected as a finalist in the NATSIAA Telstra Awards in Darwin. I hope to share my art practice and culture with a wider audience. I like working on a big scale and believe this is the future for me and my art. I want to give people an unforgettable experience and understanding when it comes to my people, culture and language.

Opposite: Leigh Namponan, 2023.

Image courtesy of Gabriel Waterman.

Above: Bruce Bell, Howling Ku’, 2023, earth pigments on wood, 40cm x 41cm x 17cm.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

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Private View at JGM Gallery, 2023.

Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

Opposite: Juan Bolivar in his North London studio, 2023.

Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

Juan Bolivar In Conversation IN THE WEEKS PRECEDING ON THE ROAD AGAIN, JULIUS KILLERBY VISITED JUAN BOLIVAR IN HIS NORTH LONDON STUDIO. THE VISIT WAS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR BOTH TO DISCUSS BOLIVAR’S WORK & THE UPCOMING EXHIBITION. WHAT FOLLOWS IS A TRANSCRIPT OF THEIR CONVERSATION. 17

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Left: Juan Bolivar, Styx, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 25cm x 21cm.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

Middle: Kaninchen und Ente (Rabbit and Duck), from the 23 October 1892 issue of Fliegende Blätter.

Right: Juan Bolivar, Barn Doors I, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 83cm x 54cm.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

JULIUS KILLERBY So, Juan, in what ways does music find its way into your work?

JUAN BOLIVAR I first began introducing, or at least referring to, music in my work in an exhibition called Bat Out Of Hell (2011) at Jacob Island Gallery. It was the first time that I not only titled works after Rock songs, but I started making references to historical artworks. It’s an interesting coincidence that those two things overlapped. It was initially informed by the problematised use of music in combat, or in video games... you know, this kind of grey area for music... but then, as time has gone on, I’ve realised that there’s actually a tradition of musical elements being adopted by painters in the past. If you look at Vermeer, who often made musical references in his paintings, or Mondrian and de Kooning, who both owned records players ahead of their time, you get a sense that music is adjacent to the making of paintings, and its gradually formed a bigger role in my work.

JK So are you interested in how music changes the context of the thing it is presented with, or alongside?

JB Well I guess there’s that element, not of how music changes the context, but how it can contextualise something. I like, for example, the way that Adam Curtis, the documentary film maker, uses music to offset images. If one is thinking about music, then one almost has a different lens that you’re looking at your work through. I also like the way that music carries memories for people, and how it can take you back to certain points in your life. It’s also, in some sense, a way of referencing culture, in a way which not everybody will be familiar with but it can also have a universality.

JB Yes, I’m using the idea of this imaginary soundtrack that somebody might be listening to on a long journey. The musical element functions as a metaphor for the idea of the “long-haul” and there’s this idea of the artist perhaps being on a similar long journey. It adds all these other associations to the idea of transportation. In my case, it’s the weight of the subject that I am dealing with.

So, there’s this playful comparison being made with someone who is taking these metaphorical contents somewhere. I also like the idea that, in some ways, the whole analogy of being a truck driver is a bit like being in the studio where you have this almost hermetic environment. There’s also comparisons between the isolation of the road and the loneliness of the studio. Truck drivers, also, will often customise the interior of their cabin and it becomes this private space in the open world.

block. I’m not sure if I necessarily agree with the other side of the question. There is a type of touch, of application. There’s a sort of tactility to it, but it exists in quite a narrow range. It’s not as though the tactility is coming out at you like a Frank Auerbach. There is texture in my work if you look a bit closer. You will find slight ridges, brush direction, or paint dripping down the edge of the canvas. That said, I’m less interested in this idea that touch defines the work. I almost like to hold back a bit, so that other things can come through.

There’s a few other artists that share this relationship with a certain kind of block colour that is applied in a certain way. There’s Peter Halley who achieves a block colour, rolling 50 layers of acrylic paint for each section. There’s an artist who sadly passed away a few years ago called Sybille Berger and she used to apply something like a hundred layers of colour. Then there’s another artist called David Diao who applies solid colour with a palette knife, or will sometimes screen print the colour. I think we all, in some way, share that intrigue with something that looks solid and mechanical but actually has a specific expressive range.

JK Why the solid application of paint? It seems almost as though you’ve removed the trace of the artist. Would you say that’s accurate?

JK Would you say that the unspoken rule amongst you and those artists is that the paint is not mixed on the surface.

JB There’s two parts to that question. And the first part, you’re absolutely right, the colour is almost supposed to be a physical material. It’s not like what I call Photoshop colour deceit, which are colours that don’t really exist anywhere, except as binary information. The colour, in my case, is almost meant to be something that you could bite into. I want to get from it as much sensation or pleasure as I can by applying it in a very solid

JB That’s right, there’s no modulation. That’s a good observation. The colour would almost always have been pre-mixed and then applied. Yes, there’s no pendimenti or scraping.

JK Is music implied by the title and subject matter of this exhibition? Because large vehicles and the phrase, “on the road again”, at least for me, brings to mind the songs that I would listen to whilst on a road trip.

“... there‘s never any attempt to undermine or negate the Canon. I think it‘s a way of extending tradition, in that it makes you look at something again.“

JK How does On The Road Again differ from your last exhibition with JGM Gallery?

JB

- Juan Bolivar.

The last show at JGM was called Pow19

erage. In that exhibition I re-enacted a lot of the works that I’m still referring to. You know, Modernist painting, Colour Field painting, artists like Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis.

In that exhibition (Powerage), I was inserting midcentury cartoons and cartoon elements as if they were existing within those works. The main difference between that approach and this show is that I am now placing what I call “rogue elements” adjacent to the works, rather than within them. The work is being referenced in an unadulterated way but I am changing the way that we perceive it.

JK In a lot of the work you’ve combined canvases of variable dimensions and in fact this is how you often suggest form, whether it be a truck or something else. What are the conceptual implications of playing with the border of an artwork like this?

JB Yes, that’s an interesting question. I’ve always been drawn to the way an artist negotiates the borders. I like to see what happens on the edge of the illusion. Mondrian’s interesting in that we imagine his work as very graphic but if you look closely at it you’ll see that some lines stop short, or go just over the edge. It’s like he’s trying to draw our attention to the border of the painting. I think borders almost suggest that the painting exists within a specific dimension. There’s a book called Flatland by Edwin Abbott and in this book he describes a fictional two-dimensional world which is one day invaded by three-dimensional elements.

It’s all meant as a kind of metaphor for Victorian society and power structures but the lasting legacy of this book is how it made people think about different dimensions. In my paintings, I’m thinking of this idea of intertextuality, about how the paint-

ing can take you somewhere else. I hadn’t really thought about it until you asked the question but I think that in this show the additional things that are outside the border point to that idea of expansion.

JK It’s interesting because generally in a representational painting, one paints on a flat surface to create an illusion of depth. Your paintings, in that two-dimensional space, have no illusion of depth. There is no tone. But you create depth and three-dimensionality by playing with these elements outside of the canvas.

JB Yes. I play with the idea that the paintings are quintessentially abstract but that, in the mind’s eye, they can flip and become forms for trucks or anything else for that matter. In some ways it’s like the 19th century Duck Rabbit illustration, where two forms are simultaneously suggested. I like the idea that my paintings are also almost Lego-like and are reminiscent of toys that we might have played with in our childhood.

JK Are your works, then, just as much sculptures as they are paintings?

JB Yes. I was watching an old de Kooning documentary where they were teasing de Kooning with a question, with words to the effect: “What is a painterly artist?” and he answers with something like “Well, it’s an artist who wants to show the brush marks.” By that definition I do consider myself a painterly artist. There are probably other ways that these images could be made. They could be printed, they could be animations. They could be made in a way that distances the viewer from the mark. So there is an element of painterliness 20

Juan Bolivar's radio, 2023.

Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

but I’m not really interested in the conventional definition of painterly.

JK Do you think that colour, as an aesthetic element, is the closest visual analogue to music? I feel that tone, scale and texture are less equivalent to music than colour is and I wonder if, perhaps subconsciously, that’s why those elements - tone and texture in particular - are noticeably absent from your work. Or maybe I’m reading too much into this?

JB I’m always a bit suspicious of the word “aesthetic”. I think that paintings are really complicated and you never just look at one element. It’s like a whole experience that you kind of mix internally. I think that today I would probably never discuss colour in that way. I might’ve done once, but today I think of it more as something that I’m sampling. It’s closer to a film director’s approach.

Tarantino, for example, always talks about mixing things. He takes one thing and adds another layer to it and that sort of throws us in different directions. I also like this idea in music of interpolation, of inserting something of a different nature into something else. Until the 19th century this was how a lot of music was made. There were existing passages or motifs that were borrowed and then new pieces would be written using those set structures. I think that in some way I’m doing something similar.

JK I agree that Tarantino is a great example of how the combination of different elements can generate something conceptually novel. There’s that scene in Reservoir Dogs, for example, where the policeman is being tortured while Stuck In The Middle With You (Stealers Wheel) is playing. It’s perverse because it’s such a happy Rock ‘n’ Roll song and yet it’s being played while someone is having their ear cut off.

JB Yes and I guess what’s interesting is that we won’t know what these things mean until maybe one hundred years from now when the references are lost or forgotten. People won’t be able to locate or understand the references at that point so we will then see what we are left with. I find that interesting to think of how the work will live on. Already, some of the references in my work probably don’t register with the majority of my audience.

JK Art about art is a recurring subject for so many artists. I wonder at what point in Art History that became a thing.

JB Well I think that’s become more apparent but I also think that it’s actually always been like that. I think we always make things that build on something else. It’s probably slightly contentious but my view is that art is always about art.

JK Yes, perhaps we’re so far removed from periods like the Renaissance that we don’t see the references in their work. Are there artists who you’ve had a particular affinity for and who you’ve referenced more than others?

JB There’s so many really. There’s the Fayum mummy portraits, which I’m really fascinated with. There’s also Duccio, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca. I know it probably sounds really pretentious or cliché, but the first artist that made a real impact on me was probably Picasso. I loved his inventiveness, what he could do with line, the way he’d make images which would then become other things and just the sheer output. More recently I’ve been looking at artists who belong to the early European avant-garde, like Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Władysław Strzemiński. There are so many. Paul Klee is just so lyrical and then there’s people like Bart van der Leck and Josef Albers. I love the work of Carmen Herrera, Marcia Hafif and Fanny Sanín. Philip Guston has been a huge influence on my work.

I draw from all of these artists but conceptually my thinking is informed by Peter Halley and David Diao - or artists like David Salle or Julia Wachtel and the way they cut and paste, mix and match.

JK It’s interesting that you bring up the Fayum portraits because, as I’m sure you’re aware, they were made to be buried with their subject and weren’t meant to be seen by anyone else. I couldn’t think of anything further from art about art, in that sense.

JB Yes, they are pre-Byzantine. It’s pre-Icon painting that makes everything symbolic. They’re not about individual expression by the artist. They precede that change in art. They’re also quite naturalistic.

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The way the eyes are rendered is incredible.

JB

Yes, and they functioned like passport photographs for the afterlife.

JK It’s fascinating to think about the motivations of an artist who would paint something like that. It’s probably something that we can’t even conceive of.

Did your childhood in Caracas have an influence on your trajectory as an artist?

JB The short answer is yes but it’s difficult to know exactly what that influence was. More and more Venezuela is becoming like this memory. It’s kind of like Blade Runner. You know, did I actually live there? Also, there’s the fact that Venezuela was, at that time, informed by many things. For example, there was a strong Modernist influence in South America, particularly in Venezuela. At the university where my parents used to teach, the campus was full of artworks and murals. There was also this mix of television and music and logos, a lot of baseball - there was this strong American influence. I think that mixing of things has probably remained in me. Venezuela is a place that I’ve written about in short stories and I often try to recall my memories from there. I grew up in Caracas, which is the main city, but we also travelled a lot to Margarita, which is a small island where my father was born and it was a little bit like going back in time or walking into a Magic Realist novel. In some ways it was quite a harsh environment. Nature is very powerful in a place like Margarita. We’d have bats flying through the living room while my grandma is watching telenovelas. You know it was like a Garcia Marquez scene.

JK I was just about to say it sounds exactly like a Garcia Marquez novel. His style of writing is so similar to how memories work, at least for me. Especially memories of childhood. There’s so many scenes in his work that almost remind me of a Rose Period Picasso.

JB The interesting thing about Magic Realism is that, in a place like Margarita it’s more like documentation, really. It’s not surreal. These things happen.

JK And I guess it’s also somewhat about the extent to which people believe in those magic realities. I was reading a book recently in which the author was

Above: Juan Bolivar, Hazmat, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 180cm x 150cm.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

Opposite: Juan Bolivar in his North London studio, 2023.

Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

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explaining the impact of magic in history. What he meant by that is that, regardless of whether magic is real, the fact that people do believe in it means that they will act according to that belief. In other words, magic, as an abstraction, has real world consequences.

JB That’s a really good observation because yes, especially in relation to what we were discussing about interpolation and metareferences, it’s very easy to think of the works as conceptual games or art about art, but actually there is that strange sense of apparition, magic or transformation. They are paintings that then become something else. So my work is in some sense a bit like that. The idea of absurdity is quite important in the work. Silliness is, I think, the simplest way to explain it. It’s not just humour but a particular type of absurd silliness that happens with these elements, which I think you could connect to some notion of Magic Realism.

JK Does that silliness also negate the seriousness of the Western Canon?

Does it make you or your audience more inclined to engage with works that might otherwise seem intimidating to play with?

JB No, there’s never any attempt to undermine or negate the Canon. I think it extends it. It’s a way of extending tradition, in that it makes you look at something again. I never see it as something that I’m trying to subvert or undermine.

It’s like viewing these works with a clean slate.

JK

Is your painting, Stevedore, meant to reference an altarpiece?

JB The work you are referring to is composed of two more or less identical van der Leck copies of a figure, and in the middle there’s a 1920’s Mondrian. The idea was that it would look like two characters loading the back of a vehicle. Initially the painting was going to have blocks that suggest wheels so that it would be more literal but because of, as you say, the allusion to the altarpiece, I decided to leave it slightly incomplete so that it would look like the figures are loading something or they’ve opened studio doors, or something. The Mondrian, then, almost becomes like an environment.

JK That’s quite a seamless fit with an altarpiece then because of course very often an altarpiece features figures who are “unloading”, so to speak, Jesus from the cross.

JB

Yes, that’s interesting.

JK Do you think that the “silliness” in your work is the result of bringing two vastly different contexts together? Your work obviously exists within a very secular context, as does Modernism to a large extent, so by bringing in that altar piece form you create a dissonance which is perhaps analogous to a kind of “silliness”.

JB Yes, but it also happens through putting two artists work together. They then create this other thing, this other experience. I don’t go out of my way to be irreverent but there is something that borders on that as well, which I’m really drawn to.

JK Could you explain your process, Juan, from the first thought you have about a work to how that materialises on the canvas.

JB One way to answer that is... well... you’re always working on the same painting, if you know what I mean. Loosely speaking, I’ve been working on the same painting for roughly twenty years. 2003 is when I would say I began making work that I recognise as my work. Before that, when I was about four or five years old at pre-school, one of our tasks before taking a nap was to draw a fish.

Everybody drew the same fish, the kind of generic body with the tail. I was looking at the person next to me and they’d drawn some waves. Then they signed their fish drawing with their name written along the same lines of the wave. I just thought “That is so good” and in a strange sense that kind of relationship to visual language underpins my process. Over the years I’ve found different ways to connect with that. In some ways it relies partly on surprise. When I first began making paintings in 2003 I would loosely describe them as “facialities”.

If you imagine taking a Colour Field painting or an Ellsworth Kelly painting, for example, and then you make a Mr. Potato Head with the eyes and nose etc. and then you stick that on the Ellsworth Kelly... the first time you do something like that there’s this element of surprise and you think to yourself, you know, that’s quite strange, but in my mind it’s similar to the signature in the waves from pre-school. You find ways to connect to that experience again. So, for me, there are two teams that make the work: one that re-enacts the work, and they’re very fastidious and will take a long time to, for example, build up the initial layers. Once that initial part is over, the work can stay in the studio untouched for anywhere between a day or a month. Then the other team comes in and says: “Okay what should we do with this?” I may have an idea already or it may be that I have no idea. So, for example, to go back to Stevedore, I’d had the idea of doing something with van der Leck for maybe two years. You never know what’s going to work and it doesn’t always work. I don’t like to destroy work but that does happen sometimes. It’s never really quite clear why a certain combination or intervention doesn’t work. That’s roughly the process. I generally only need to know what the next two works are going to be like.

Juan Bolivar, Def Leppard, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 25cm x 21cm.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

JK Do you find that conversations like this help clarify the ideas you’ve been working with?

JB Yes, it definitely makes a difference, but even if there is some semblance of clarity, I don’t think artists ever really know how they arrive at something.

JK sight.

I guess these conversations are a way of rationalizing decisions in hind-

JB Yes, like drawing the target after you’ve thrown the dart. I’m slightly sceptical of that. Don’t get me wrong. I love talking about my work and it’s great to have these conversations, but I also think that one can say things that don’t really apply. I think to make art you have to be slightly clueless about what you’re doing. If there’s too much cluelessness then there’s perhaps anxiety surrounding your creative process and it suffers from that, but by the same token if there’s too much certainty then that can also be a problem.

JK Is the time between exhibitions, when you’re first deciding what work you’re going to create, an exciting period for you?

JB Yes, I enjoy elements of that. I think the most enjoyable moment is possibly when you have a wacky idea and you carry it through and you’re making the last little adjustments or retouching a work. When, you know, you’re getting it ready for the world.

“... it‘s very easy to think of the works as conceptual games or art about art, but actually there is that strange sense of apparition, magic or transformation.

They are paintings that then become something else.“ - Juan Bolivar.

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Juan Bolivar, Towing Dolly, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 98cm x 118cm.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

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NYARAPAYI GILES & ALMA KALAJU WEBOU ANTONIA CRICHTON-BROWN ANALYSES TWO SIGNIFICANT WORKS FROM JGM GALLERY ’S COLLECTION. NYARAPAYI GILES (1940-2019) WAS BORN IN THE GIBSON DESERT AT AN IMPORTANT CULTURAL SITE CALLED KARRKU. IT WAS THIS SITE AND THE ASSOCIATED TJUKURRPA THAT INSPIRED HER POWERFUL PAINTINGS. ALMA KALAJU WEBOU (1928-2009) WAS A RESPECTED YULPARIJA ELDER FROM PINKALAKARA IN THE GREAT SANDY DESERT. A REVERED MATRIARCH SKILLED IN TRIBAL LAW, WEBOU HELD A PROMINENT PLACE WITHIN HER COMMUNITY.

Below: Alma Kalaju Webou, Pinkalarta, 2006, acrylic on linen, 166cm x 106.5cm.

Image courtesy of JGM Gallery.

Opposite page: Nyarapayi Giles, Warmurrungu, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 177cm x 148.5cm.

Image courtesy of JGM Gallery.

“I

lost my mummy and sister here,” said Alma (Kalaju) Webou when speaking of Pinkalarta, her mother’s Country and the place where she was born and grew up in the Great Sandy Desert. The arid planes span from Australia’s north-western coastline into the heart of the Northern Territory. A devastating seven-year drought in the 1970s exiled Webou’s people, the Yulparija, from this expanse and into the beckoning hands of the Bidyadanga Community south of Broome, at this time managed by a Catholic mission as a catchment zone for several displaced Aboriginal language and social groups. Webou returned to painting Pinkalarta time and time again, however, she shared very little about the history of her Country, even as a Yulparija senior law woman.

The condition in Bidyadanga of heterogenous clan groups integrating into one zone created an environment where elders protected their own cultural knowledge. But perhaps we can engage with Webou’s dense lattices of dot work not only as topographies depicting her Country but an insistent recollection of her cultural memory.

is striking due to Giles’ bold use of warring pigments: tawny reds, brilliant Azul and ultramarine, deep grey, feathery cream, brick pink and Atlantic green which, when juxtaposed, unite in a kaleidoscopic masterpiece. The artists’ work is celebrated for its unusual capacity to do away with the “soft aesthetic” common to “painting by a desert woman.”

Giles is widely acknowledged as one of the leading artists who brought international attention to painting from Ngaanyatjarra Country. One of her first canvases for Tjarlirli Art was a finalist in the 2008 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award (NATSIAA) and awarded First Prize in the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital Art Award that same year. Giles’ posthumous reputation continues to develop with more recent exhibitions of her works in Australia and internationally.

In remembering Pinkalarta, Webou striates this particular canvas in fleshy, teal and marsh green pigments, colours not of the desert but the saltwater landscape of Bidyadanga, transmitting her lived experience of migration on to the Country she was forced to abandon.

A linear intersection across the painting’s top quadrant, reaching from the far left to the far right, red bordering in the centre entrapping a field of green hues, and its white frame may conjure for us associative aerial views of pastoral land with demarcating fence lines. The history of cattle stations along the Canning Stock Route in the Great Sandy Desert of Webou’s naissance were incursions on Yulparija Country during her lifetime and perhaps in Pinkalarta we see these interactions disclosed visually.

Otherwise, this painting is a tumbling together of red, pink and teal currents perhaps mimicking the rolling dunes of the desert. However compounded interpretations of Webou’s work have the potential to become, Pinkalarta arises from the artist’s personal context interweaving the concealed yet enduring histories of her Country, the trauma of losing family and leaving home, and the bond built with a new one.

Nyarapayi Giles, a Ngaanyatjarra woman, began painting on canvas while settled in Patjarr Community, when the Modern Desert Art Movement sprung from Papunya Tula and gained astounding momentum. She has been described as a “first contact” woman as her youth was lived nomadically in the Gibson Desert. Giles painted between various communities in Ngaanyatjarra Lands until 2006 when Tjarlirli Art was established in Tjukurla Community, which lies between Kintore and Kaltukatjara (Docker River), resting on the banks of saltwater Lake Hopkins, its surrounding landscape bearing sandhills, claypans and desert oak trees. Karrku, where Giles was born, is an important cultural site associated with the Karlaya Tjukurrpa (Emu Dreaming) in which emus are rumoured to have gone digging in the local ochre deposit for the fine-grained powder that, when combined with water, transforms into a red, sanguineous substance. Red ochre, such as that found at Karrku, holds ceremonial weight, used in initiative body painting and later by artists on canvas.

The deep knowledge Giles possessed of these ancestral histories is evidenced in Warmurrungu, where large concentric circles in fluorescent hues, interlaced by poised dot work, partnered by auxiliary lines and arcs can be understood as picturing the location of the ochre pits and sand dunes in Ngaanyatjarra Country. The arrangement 29

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TOM NORRIS | ALSO RISES KATHERINE JONES RA EXAMINES JUXTAPOSITIONS IN TOM NORRIS’ ALSO RISES, THE ARTIST’S FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION AT JGM GALLERY. JONES OFFERS INSIGHTS INTO THE DIALECTICS OF DIRECT AND REMEMBERED EXPERIENCE, MAN AND NATURE, DISORDER AND HARMONY - THEMES

I

N NORRIS’ WORK small, incidental observations seem to be given as much emphasis as the grandiose. This produces a harmony that seems to clarify a unique ‘earthy’ feeling. In striving to reach something essential he edits the memory of the forest or garden. Dreams and memories of natural space and growth collected on frequent woodland walks are unearthed and reconfigured in the artist’s studio. Perhaps the brutalist architecture of Norris’ urban surroundings - the concrete, linear nature of South East London sharpens his responses to the contrast of wilderness.

WHICH ARE IMPLICIT IN NORRIS’ PAINTINGS AND CERAMIC VESSELS.

Norris uses the form of the ceramic vessel, not straightforwardly as fine art, but also as a functional object. The toughness of some of the vessels and their robust, bear-hug size is balanced by their soft, honest silhouette. As Bernard Leach points out in his BBC film, A Potter’s World, “A pot is a living thing, its associations are markedly human… and we intuitively feel a good pot's honesty, strength, nobility, warmth, delicacy or charm, much as we do with people.”

The painted marks reflecting the ordered chaos of plants and animals sometimes implied and at other times explicit - seem to expand the pots to create a dialogue with their sister, two-dimensional wall-mounted works.

These canvases are often carefully stitched together to frame, divide or join various elements. The handmade nature of this exhibition continues through to the installation of the work to the mounting of the ceramics on wooden structures also built by the artist. Each part feeds the other, creating a rhythmic to-and-fro from one part to the next and back again, at a pace determined uniquely by the viewer.

Left: Tom Norris, Blue Leach, 2023, ceramic stoneware, 55cm x 25cm.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

Below: Tom Norris’ oil sticks, 2023.

Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

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It is when we look at nature minutely or slowly and absorb it as Norris has done here, that we can feel a small amount of optimism. Nature, in whichever form, will, through this incremental plodding, ultimately outlive and survive us.

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Above: Tom Norris, Right Out The Treehouse, 2023, oil on canvas, 100cm x 86cm.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

Opposite: Tom Norris, Installation of 35 ceramic vessels, 2023, variable dimensions.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

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34

ÖMIE BARKCLOTHS JULIUS

KILLERBY

EXAMINES

THE

ICONOGRAPHY OF CREATION MYTHS IN ÖMIE NIOGE (BARKCLOTHS). THIS TEXT WAS PRODUCED ALONGSIDE ÖMIE, A GROUP EXHIBITION OF SEVENTEEN ARTISTS FROM ORO PROVINCE IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA, ON DISPLAY AT JGM GALLERY BETWEEN APRIL AND MAY OF 2023. KILLERBY DRAWS TRANSCULTURAL COMPARISONS BETWEEN THE SYMBOLIC AND AESTHETIC FEATURES OF NIOGE AND EXPLORES THE WAYS IN WHICH THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT IN ORO

PROVINCE

INFLUENCES

THE

ÖMIE

PEOPLES’ ARTWORKS.

“These barkcloths are as sacred to the Ömie as the information depicted on them. A Western analogue, though not an exact equivalent, would be the representation of a biblical narrative on a holy relic.“ - Julius Killerby.

Opposite page: Diona Jonevari (Suwarari), Dahoru’e, bubori anö’e, vë’i ija ahe, odunaigö’e, jö’o sor’e, sabu ahe, siha’e, taigu taigu’e ohu’o douhia’e soré, 2022, natural pigments on nioge (barkcloth), 147cm x 83cm.

Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

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N

IOGE (BARKCLOTH) IS PROFOUNDLY SACRED to the Ömie of Papua New Guinea. Part of their creation story details the moment when the first man and woman, Mina and Suja, are clothed in the textile. There is here an interesting connection with Adam and Eve and the wearing of these garments does in some sense symbolise, as it does for the protagonists of Genesis, a transition from innocence. The similarities between the Ömie and societies which, until recently, had not been exposed to their culture, does not stop there. Rather remarkably, there are aesthetic and conceptual similarities between their Art and barkcloth designs from other localities, including the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, Africa and South America, amongst others. Indeed, these may not simply be similarities, but innate ideas that cross-culturally populate the collective unconscious.

What does perhaps distinguish the Ömie’s work is its added emphasis on fecundity. Suja, to celebrate her new found fertility, dyed her nioge in red volcanic river mud. The creation of a nioge design, then, is explicitly linked to the creative forces of nature and for the Ömie, their construction is a venerated act, equally sublime to the growth of a tree, the crashing of a wave, or the birth of a child. The sihoti’e nioge (mud-dyed barkcloths) on exhibit by artists Brenda Kesi (Ariré), Rosemon Hinana and Patricia Warera (Matomguo) have been dyed in the same way that Suja dyed her barkcloth. Appliquéd using a fine bat-wing bone needle, these pieces, with their contrasting browns and creamy whites, bring the Ömie’s ancestral past into the present. They provide a window through time into the early development of Ömie symbolism, yet with a discernibly contemporary sensibility.

What is remarkable, then, is that these barkcloths are as sacred to the Ömie as the information depicted on them. A Western analogue, though not an exact equivalent, would be the representation of a Biblical narrative on a holy relic.

For the Ömie there is thus a parallel between form and content. The medium and the subject are intertwined, imbuing these works with a profound spiritual significance.

Randall Morris, in 2013, wrote of Ömie nioge that “There is a collective genius at work here that allows for iconoclasm and the vision of the individual set into the matrix of the culture itself.” By example, Diona Jonevari’s Se’a hu’e, dahoru’e, bubori anö’e, vë’i ija ahe, odunaigö’e, jö’o sor’e, sabu ahe, vinohu’e ohu’o siha’e is just that; quintessentially “Ömie”, but with a distinctly individual aesthetic cadence. Like many nioge, her design is bordered with mountains, a reference to the surroundings in Oro Province, where the Ömie reside. Compositionally, this alpine border emphasizes the centre of the arrangement, as does the red pigment used to paint it. It arrests our attention. The reference to local geographical features also implies that this work distils something about Ömie culture.

The rest of Jonevari’s nioge is divided into rectangular sections, within which she depicts the beaks of Papuan Hornbills, lizard bones, jungle vine and initiation tattoo designs. Flowing through the composition, and touching each of these symbols, is the red pigment sourced from the skin of the biredihane tree, known to the Ömie as bariré. This colour is a reference, as it was for Suja, to fertility but also, more generally, the fecundity that makes all aspects of Ömie life and culture possible. This is accentuated by the zig-zag lines which suffuse the surface with a sense of interconnectedness and electricity.

Dazzling optical effects such as these are even more overt in the work of the late Albert Sirimi (Nanati), whose nioge are almost hallucinogenic in quality.

Sirimi’s work, Ujavu am’e (guai); taigu taigu’e; juburi anö’e; ahéhuruvë’e; nuni’e; ohu’o sabu ahe, shows how the utilitarian and artistic purposes of these barkcloths compliment each other. Brennan King, the Ömie Artists’ Manager, describes a concept once explained to him by Sirimi, called buriéto’e. “It was used to describe the phenomenal experience when a person looks upon a dancer wearing their barkcloth skirt or loincloth and the painted designs “change” and “come alive with beauty”.” That these patterns “come alive” would also explain why the Ömie see a parallel between their Art and the creative forces of nature.

This densely patterned aesthetic is characteristic of what could be called “The School Of Albert Sirimi”, which includes the artists, Jessie Bujava (Kipora), Barbara Rauno (Inasu) and Maureen Sirimi (Jafuri).

The works exhibited in Ömie are exquisite and archetypal examples of an ancient, though recently discovered art form. On display is a hybrid of design, performance and ritual—a sublime contribution to the contemporary art world.

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Installation of works from Ömie: (Left to right), (1) Rosemon Hinana, Aduvahe sihoti’e nioge ohu’o buborianö’e, 2022, 186.5cm x 78cm, (2) Brenda Kesi (Ariré), Wo’ohohe, 2018, 143cm x 82cm, (3) Brenda Kesi (Ariré), Taliobamë’e nioge, 2018, 119cm x 66cm, (4) Patricia Warera (Matomguo), Wo’ohohe, 2021, 137cm x 79cm, (5) Rosemon Hinana, Jö’o sor’e sihoti’e nioge ohu’o bubori anö’e, 2022, 147cm x 68.5cm, all appliquéd mud-dyed nioge (barkcloth).

Front cover: Styx (detail), 2023. Photo courtesy of Daniel Browne.

Back cover: Bruce Bell with his work, Howling Ku’. Photo courtesy of Gabriel Waterman.

Editorial design: Julius Killerby.

Photography: Julius Killerby, Gabriel Waterman & Brennan King.

Artwork Photography: Daniel Browne and Julius Killerby. © 2023 JGM Gallery.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-7392905-6-6 JGM Gallery 24 Howie Street London SW11 4AY info@jgmgallery.com