Celebrating place: the Bermagui Project

Tags

Bega Regional Art Gallery, Bermagui Project, Fresh Salt, layerings, videos

For some years now the Four Winds Music Festival, held over two days at Easter, has been a highlight of the south coast cultural calendar. It has gradually expanded into a full year program including music, workshops, radical-voice lectures, performances and now the Bermagui Project.

This Project brings together Yuin people, scientists, historians, authors, artists and people with deep local knowledge to create paintings, poems, photographs and videos celebrating eight estuaries between the sacred mountains of Gulaga and Mumbulla. It uses the process of creative field studies, developed by scholars at the Australian National University over the last twenty years.

The project culminated in an exhibition of the paintings, photos, videos and soundscapes at the Bega Regional Art Gallery, whence I betook myself this week. The 200 kilometre round trip was well worth it, although I’d already seen the images in the catalogue. This is never quite a substitute for seeing the real things, although it was certainly an incentive.

The exhibition began with two videos of mesmerising water ripples above rocks? a human figure? Maybe the title is the decider: The cult of forgetfulness #1 and #2. The video artists are Lee Pemberton and Paul Hooper ( #1) and Delia Silvan and Lee Pemberton ( #2)

What particularly caught my eye as I moved on from ripples? Not this depiction of landscape as tartan in Headland by Lachlan Dibden, despite his artist’s talk about light and space. My landscape isn’t an array of straight lines, repetition, and 1950s colour.

The botanical drawings of Gilda McKechnie (Looking through a coastal Banksia at Camel Rock); Veronica O’Leary (Banksia serrated, Cuttagee); and Sharon Field (Understorey, head of Cuttagee Road) were more appealing, with their sharpness of detail and background landscape.

Then there was The ballad of Jimmy Crook. A visual as a ballad? Well yes, once you see how many images Paul Jackson can fit into one, how many stories he can tell, and how much commentary he can offer wielding charcoal.

No representation of country would be complete without the Aboriginal voice through a dot painting, in this case Lee Cruse’s A healthy river. Checking out this artist opened a can of worms. He painted a mural on a water tower in Eden in 2017, and controversy erupted when he was gaoled for domestic violence. Can you separate art from criminal behaviour? Should his painting be removed? Another question emerges too: the painting in this exhibition wasn’t painted as part of the Bermagui Project, since it’s dated 2012. But oh, those gloriously thick dots.

An odd coming together was Victoria Nelson’s sculpture of the seed of Corymbia maculata (spotted gum) in Carrara marble.

However what most caught my eye were a number of pieces that used layering to capture the complexity of landscape. Now they offered horizontal and vertical lines I didn’t object to!

In Robyn Williams’ Spotted gums (Corymbia maculata), captured in ink washes and graphite, the layers were vertical and dimensional: three levels on top of each other, like a form of decoupage.

Helen Morris’s Diamond python, etched on Perspex with acrylic paint over graphite, showed the snake with his food supply: the bush rat, the southern brown bandicoot, and fungi.

The simplicity of the layering of Chandelle Gogerly’s Cuttagee 001 in which she used photography to “capture and preserve the details sometimes missed by casual observation” offered grasses, seaweed and the tangle of nature’s white netting.

Trevor King’s more complex Horizons used digitally scanned and drawn images of littoral and forest plants, along with lines marking the landscape and clouds. (Apologies for the reflections in the first image.) I loved this one for its imaginative approach to showing luxuriance, its simplified but still-recognisable flowers, its use of bark as background, its solid base of silhouettes.

I spent most time in front of a short video by David Gallan called Flow, a wonderful entwining of images of water from pools to wave-breaking ocean, and the creatures that live in this water: rock orchid leaning, fallen flowers amongst the reflection of the parent tree, a water insect, waves on rocks, more reflection, a pair of lyrebirds, two dolphins creating a calligraphy of swirls.

The most intriguing image of all was Flora and fauna, Yuin Kelly’s digital print triptych of spotted gum bark with its faces.

Trevor King in Sensing Place expresses our relationship with place beautifully.

Bearing disciplined and loving witness

We deepen

Into our home terrain

Using every sense

To know it

For what it is

Describing, with forensic care

How life arranges itself there

Place-literate

At peace with landscape

We draw

We paint

We write ourselves into awareness

Construct meaning

Engage in the practice of belonging

Places are processes

Quietly, continuously changing

Unfinished

We never finish our knowing of them

We are each

Dynamic

Conversing with place

Through broad dialogue

Minute observation

We become the result of this essay

In understanding

Give myself over

Landscape will sculpt my individuality

If you want to read this as the poet formatted it, you can find it on p. 26 of the catalogue.

Unsettled

Tags

Bega Regional Art Gallery, Tracey Moffatt, Venice Biennale

Tracey Moffatt is an Australian photographer, our entry in the Venice Biennale, and only incidentally an Aboriginal woman, although a lot of her art is very much about the Aboriginal experience.

I return to Bega Regional Art Gallery to see an exhibition of her work. I begin with “Doomed” (2007), a video collage and the genesis of my unsettling. It is ten minutes of disaster – tidal waves, fire, collapsing buildings and general mayhem – all footage from movies. This is not my usual visual diet. My response is to giggle uncomfortably at many of the sequences, I hope the ones the verbiage designated “trashy”.

“Something more” (1989), a sequence of nine photographs, both cibachrome (colour) and silver gelatine (black and white), does nothing to settle me. This is a narrative sequence, and could also be called “Doomed”. It’s the story of a young Aboriginal woman who moves hopefully beyond her life in an outback hut, only to be murdered and left by the road.

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

“Some lads”, an early work, provides a brief moment of relief. Here the photographer captures the energy of dancers in the Aboriginal and Islanders Dance Company.

The relief doesn’t last long. The series of tone gravure prints called “Laudanum” (1998) contain horror subdued by technique, but there’s still a sense of doom in the architectural contortions and the ghost-like figures. The photos were taken in Elizabeth Bay House and a Georgian farmhouse north of Sydney, and were produced by Mapplethorpe’s printer by techniques unavailable in Australia. I’m learning a bit about the collaborative nature of photography., and about a photography nothing like my snaps of sunny beaches.

Photos from the series “Scarred for life” (1990s), captioned very matter-of-factly, depicts incidents from childhood which will never be forgotten.

 

The final video “Nice coloured girls” (1987) shows colonialism stood on its head as Aboriginal girls cruise Kings Cross looking for a drunk bloke to roll, with juxtaposed extractcs from early colonial journals about the exploitation of Aborginal girls. Or is it the ongoing outcome of colonial brutalities?

A lot of Moffatt’s photographs are staged costume pieces. The children’s room in the gallery has a collection of props and costumes, a mirror, paints and a camera and encourages children to emulate Moffatt’s modus operandi, if not her dark themes.

If you’d like to see Tracey Moffatt’s entry called “My horizons” in the Venice Biennale, you can find some images here, and a Guardian review here.

Disclaimer: I had no idea that this exhibition would give my readers cause to say yet again: “Not for me Meg.”