ROBERT FIELDING
Ki n a r a pu l ka irnya n i palya n u. Tji nt ungku kampara uti n u. [The big moon shone brightly and made. The sun burnt through and brought it out.]
FLAVELL
(there are no museums at the end of the world)
WANJU, WELCOME
We are very pleased to present to you two major exhibitions for the Perth Festival in 2024. Our selection of artist and artwork offers a response to the Festival theme of Ngaangk, Mother Sun , who sits over all of us, reminding us of our shared humanity, and this precious planet we call home. Through these exhibitions we collectively invite you to consider themes of sustainability and caring for Country, with the Sun as a constant source of power and possibility.
Robert Fielding (SA) is an artist of Pakistani, Afghan, Western Arrente and Yankunytjatjara descent working with photography, print and video to reveal a complex and intertwined relationship with the spirit of the land. Engaging with site-specific interventions and process-based practices, Fielding merges abandoned objects, natural elements, and sacred language in an ongoing dialogue between the artist and the Country upon which he works.
Walyalup based artist Susan Flavell (WA) engages myth and fantasy, applying a range of material strategies to create compelling sculptural forms with this magnum opus, seven years in the making. While employing different methods, both artists attentively reclaim detritus to create new forms that
establish a harmony between objects, their history and their place. These hybrid creations demand their own agency, reminding us that we disregard Country, nature and spirit at our peril. These are simultaneously political and loving actions for the sustainability of our planet.
These ambitious exhibitions reflect Curtin’s vision to work in partnership to make a difference for people and our planet. Embedding the voices and perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and establishing meaningful links to the UN Sustainable Development Goals is core to our teaching and research. We are excited to commence the year with two exhibitions that exemplify this vision.
We are grateful to work in collaboration with artists such as Susan and Robert, and we invite you to join us in the public programs, events and activities associated with these two remarkable exhibitions. Keep an eye out on socials or sign up to our mailing list to stay up to date as these and other events unfold over the year.
Susan Flavell, She who Scribes the Sorrows (love) (detail), 2018, recycled, found, gifted or second hand materials. Photograph by Bo Wong.
Susan Flavell, Spirit Animal Extinction Elephant, 2021, recycled, found, gifted or second hand materials. Photograph by Sharon Baker.
SUSAN
FLAVELL
Horn of the Moon - 13 Goddesses (there are no museums at the end of the world)
They used their dreams, their slips of tongue, their fantasies . . . as maps or signposts for a country, which lay just beyond, or alongside, or within the landscape, they could see and touch.¹
- Doris Lessing
Susan Flavell has been dreaming about the end of the world since 1984. She says, “When I dream or am in that space between sleep and awake, I am overwhelmed and overpowered by a continuous stream of images both dark and hilarious”. Flavell’s work has long materialised as a chaotic melding of forms like an unfolding game of exquisite corpse. In this exhibition, hallucinatory visions are brought to life on an epic scale. Like a shelter housing mythical beasts and animate detritus, washed up on an apocalyptic tide, the ambitious multi-gallery installation is a beautiful and frightening carnival: a day of the dead procession, a celebration, a call to arms. Haunted by visions of environmental disaster in both her dream and waking states, Susan Flavell employs magical thinking as a political strategy against climate apocalypse. Yet, this is no miserable trek into dystopia, instead it is a darkly funny wonderland of strange treasures that sits somewhere between the real ground of Wadjuk boodja and a slippery, turbulent dreamscape.
In my dream, a glowing cord connects me, umbilical-like, to the tree – we each have a swirling vortex of light in our mid-section from which the tendrils emerge and unite. When the bulldozer topples the giant Tuart, I wake in a panic feeling torn apart. It’s January 2017 and the community I share with Susan Flavell is reeling from the violent and rapid clearing of virgin bushland to make way for the Roe8 development. Having been arrested for a ‘lock-on’ action at the very start of the protest movement, Flavell has been forced to stay away from the site under a Move On Order.
As a local resident and passionate environmental activist, the fight to save the Beeliar Wetlands in part inspired Susan Flavell’s Horn of the Moon exhibition at the John Curtin Gallery, central to which was Susan’s first Goddess ‘Kali’. In Hindu tradition, Kali symbolises Mother Nature. She is the Goddess of destruction and change, the manifestation of pure female cosmic energy and the mother of all living beings. Flavell’s terrifying incarnation of Kali loomed over the gallery, her horned, mouthless face covered in eyes with rows of breasts cascading above a flowering, indeterminate genitalia. The work recalls Kali’s legend: to destroy evil in order to defend the innocent. With a childhood spent moving across the world, from Central America to the UK, the trauma of Roe8 had the unexpected outcome of allowing Flavell a sense of belonging for the first time in her life, anchoring her to the environment and community where she lives and works.
Over the past seven years, Flavell has gone on to create another twelve ‘Goddesses’ that represent themes such as love, fire, flood, plants, drought and hope, brought together for the first time at the John Curtin Gallery. Founded on story-telling practices, Flavell’s artwork reveals notions of the fantastic, the monstrous and the mythical. Driven by a fundamental commitment to the use of recycled materials, Flavell’s work interrogates accepted hierarchies of material value. Everything in the exhibition, wherever possible, is recycled. Previous works have been modified and reworked and the vast majority of the materials have been recycled, found, gifted or second hand. The result is a sensual collage of objects whose meanings push and pull between the known and strange, creating their own songs and rhythms. This strange procession is also an ending: Flavell does not want to take back a single object at the conclusion of the exhibition. All that is not claimed by others will be recycled or abandoned if needs must, making way for new dreams and futures.
Lia McKnight
¹ Doris Lessing, 1969, The Four-Gated City, London : MacGibbon & Kee, p. 413.
Susan Flavell, Spirit Animal Extinction Bird, Bear, Elephant, 2021, recycled, found, gifted or second hand materials. Photograph by Sharon Baker.
Ki n a r a pu l ka irnya n i palya n u. Tji nt ungku kampara uti n u.
[The big moon shone brightly and made. The sun burnt through and brought it out.]
Robert Fielding traces the cycles of day and night across the chassis of abandoned cars, or the frames of forgotten bicycles. These traces hold a rhythmic cadence where speech and text flow and unfold, ardent like the glowing sun.
Reading Fielding’s poetic exhibition title is like watching him speak, our eyes search out the words, transfixed by their elusive, esoteric meanings. Considered as a curatorial refrain, Fielding’s title is an invocation that resonates with the Perth Festival theme – in Noongar language, Ngaangk, “the ultimate creator – rising, surely each morning at dawn to break the still darkness of night”.¹ The works in this exhibition each uniquely evoke the cyclical play between the Sun and Moon, the great drivers of life, culture, language and Country.
A contemporary artist of Pakistani, Afghan, Western Arrente and Yankunytjatjara descent, and currently living in Mimili community on APY lands, Fielding wields a range of mediums, tools and stories with elastic, deeply lived and cyclical devotion. As a recurring theme, Fielding bears the history of objects he finds across Mimili, recontextualising the cycles of life and death: eating, moving, playing and sleeping. The found objects that feature in the series of photographs Objects of Origin (2018) and the accompanying video work Cycles (2018) are significant to the Mimili community. Bicycles hold a history of prestige, and prams carried new generations. Flour buckets, once holding rations of flour, tea, sugar or tobacco are repurposed as stools or legs for a bed. Collectively such objects speak to the love, loss and community of Mimili that holds and sustains its members. Fielding is deeply committed to his people, Country and culture, there is no separation between his life and art.
In our language we say Ngapartji-Ngapartji: A process of doing things together, side by side. To give to one another, to share.²
¹ Alta Winmar with Roma Yibiyung Winmar, Perth Festival 2024 Program. ² https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/whats-on/tarnanthi/tarnanthi-2023/tarnanthi -robert-fielding-keynote-address/, retrieved 11/01/2024. ³ https://nga.gov.au/publications/ceremony/robert-fielding, retrieved 11/01/2024.
Manta Miil-miilpa (2022) is a collection of photograms in which Fielding records the interplay between language and landscape. A dance between artist and Country, the paper accumulates marks and an aura of colour that evokes the eternal presence of Tjukurpa and his ancestors’ spirits. On top of these ephemeral frottages, Fielding photographs the landscape using a UV sensitive dye to expose the image onto the paper, and the traces of variable natural elements are recorded. To finish the works, the exposures are washed in the water of the land and left to dry.
Graveyards in Between (2017) details the encounter and transformative gestures Fielding undertakes with found cars: the trace of past Mimili Elders. Onto the bonnets, doors, hubcaps and roofs of the cars, Fielding inscribes the patterns of the Anangu people: codes that hold sacred cultural knowledge. In the video that accompanies his series of nine photographs, Fielding reverently walks around each of the cars, studying their form. Dots and lines expand outwards in response to existing physical characteristics: rust, dents, bullet holes. The shape and design of each car provide starting points for these performative collaborations.
Noted as culturally significant objects in 2019, large numbers of the car wrecks have nonetheless been removed to make way for sweeping infrastructure and road upgrades, without community consultation. Fielding’s ongoing project/action part functions as a memorial, highlighting “the long and ongoing list of injustices inflicted on our people and on our land”.³ The cars offer potent symbols of travel, family, colonial infrastructure, waste, and decay. In collaboration with such symbols, Fielding attends and renews these graveyards with a deep respect for their history, and for what kinds of futures they point toward.
Fielding's practice demonstrates reciprocity, and in doing so, gathers ideas, stories and histories on labour, renewal, encounter, transformation, childhood, language and Country. From the earliest dawn, the most sunbaked midday, to the calmest twilight and deepest night.
Paul Boyé & Lia McKnight
ROBERT FIELDING
Images from right: Robert Fielding, Manta Miil-miilpa [Sacred Earth], 2021, UV print on cotton rag with aerosol paint alteration, 76 x 111 cm. Robert Fielding, Graveyards in Between #6, 2017 pigment inkjet print on archival paper, 80 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Mimili Maku Arts.
ROBERT FIELDING
Kinara munu Tjintu [Moon and Sun]
Robert Fielding is a contemporary artist of Pakistani, Afghan, Western Arrente and Yankunytjatjara descent, who lives in Mimili community on the APY Lands. Robert combines strong cultural roots with contemporary views on the tensions between community life and global concerns. In 2022 he was featured as part of the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and in 2023 he presented as part of The National 4 at Art Gallery of New South Wales.
SUSAN FLAVELL
Horn of the Moon - 13 Goddesses
Susan Flavell is an accomplished artist with over 40 years experience. Through her diverse practice, Flavell explores themes of animals, nature, the environment, the unconscious, the fantastic, the monstrous, and the mythical. Flavell's work has been showcased in notable exhibitions, most recently, Storm the Gods & Shake the Universe, FORM Gallery (2023), Golden Flowers, Art Collective (2018), Horn of the Moon, John Curtin Gallery (2017), The Dog's Artist, Fremantle Arts Centre (2016), An Internal Difficulty, PICA & AOTM (2015) and Freud's Desk, Turner Galleries (2013).
9 February - 14 April 2024
Publication copyright 2024
John Curtin Gallery unless otherwise stated. Text Copyright ©Paul Boyé ©Lia McKnight
All rights reserved.
This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. No illustration in this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. All works of art are copyright of the artists. ISBN: 978-0-6450795-8-6
Curator: Lia McKnight.
This exhibition is a Perth Festival event supported by Visual Arts Program Partner Wesfarmers Arts, and Lotterywest.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Angus Webb and Anna Wattler from Mimili Maku Arts for their administrative support in bringing the work of Robert Fielding to John Curtin Gallery.
Susan Flavell would like to thank the countless people who have donated, gifted, repurposed and recycled materials to her practice to make these works possible. She also thanks Theo Costantino, Olga Cironis and Andrew Nicholls for their critical contributions to the development of this work over the last several years; and Ashley Smith for coordinating the production of Children of the Drifting Weather (2022). Thank you to the Fremantle Arts Centre residency program for providing studio space at the Moores Building Art Space.
The support of the Perth Festival, in particular Annika Kristensen, Visual Arts Curator and Sam Nerida, Associate Producer, Creative Learning for the coordination of several workshops in collaboration with Susan Flavell.
Thank you to all the team at the John Curtin Gallery who have worked tirelessly to generate another impeccably produced assembly of experiences for our visitors. The staff’s collective dedication and teamwork allow us to meet every challenge and continue to deliver exhibitions of the highest standard.
The John Curtin Gallery values the opportunity to work collaboratively with artists to present enriching experiences for our audiences. We sincerely thank Susan and Robert for their immense generosity.
JOHN CURTIN GALLERY
John Curtin Gallery Building 200A, Curtin University Kent St, Bentley Western Australia 6102
Mon to Fri 11am-5pm Sat during Feb 12-4pm Sun 12-4pm
Closed Public Holidays
Free admission
curtin.edu.au/jcg @johncurtingallery gallery@curtin.edu.au 08 9266 4155
Cover page 1: Robert Fielding, Objects of Origin 4, 2018, series of 4 C-Type prints on dibond, 110 x 165 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Mimili Maku Arts.
Cover page 2: Susan Flavell, The Star Charts Necklace (detail), 2023, recycled, found, gifted or second hand materials, 160 x 350 cm.