Celebration

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Aboriginal art, NAIDOC week, Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery

NAIDOC Week celebrations are held across Australia each July to acknowledge the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This year the theme is Our languages matter. In the late 18th century, when the British invaded, there were 250 distinct Indigenous language groups, most with several dialects. Today only about 120 of those languages are still spoken: there are many attempts to reclaim languages that are almost lost, often word by meagre word. Many members of the Stolen Generation remember being beaten for speaking language, as a frontline attempt at brutal assimilation.

Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery in partnership with the Granite Belt Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporation marks the  week with an exhibition of Aboriginal art by local and visiting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. It “connects past and present, people and land, spirituality and reality,” representing one of the oldest ongoing traditions of art in the world. It offers me many pleasures: design, colour and familiarities.

The first collage is a mix of items behind glass: Aboriginal designs on wood, cap, ceramics, shells, and baby jumpsuits. The two brown and black wooden bowls are by Timeika Reena Slockee; the shells by Aurora De Vries; and to my shame I didn’t record Jumpsuit details.

A few artists are so distinctive that I recognise them instantly: Krishna Heffernan’s “Gum flowers”, “Campfire”, “Creek bubbles” and “Brisbane River”, all bright with acrylic, paper and thread on canvas …

… Corina Graham’s mixed media with gold leaf …

… Rod McIntosh’s elegant stylised animals …

… and Timeika Rena Slockee’s “Sandhills”, “Wild flowers at the waterhole”,  “Mothers of nature” and the painting that expresses the theme of NAIDOC week, “Reconnecting language.”

There are too many painting that please me to feature each one separately, so here’s a collage with attributions clockwise from the top left: Chenaya Bancroft-Davis’ linoprint “Sacred site”: Maris de Vries’  “Mudfish” (acrylic on canvas): Bronwyn Smith’s “Fish trap” (acrylic on canvas): Chenaya Bancroft-Davis’ “Jacaranda season” (acrylic on canvas): another Bronwyn Smith “Fish trap” (acrylic on canvas): Marica Staples’ “Emus” (acrylic on canvas): Tully de Vries’ “Gali lady” (acrylic on canvas): Amanda Watts-Nyoor’s “Kungarakan mum” (acrylic on canvas): and in the centre Amarina Nhaynes’ “Moorgumpin Nguru Wandehn – Moreton Bay spirits” (acrylic on canvas).

I can’t resist a few closeups: Charmaine Davis’ “The rocks” (acrylic on canvas) because of its connection with boulder country …

… and River Brando Binge’s “Miri Mari – star people” because of its drama and the way it mixes traditional Aboriginal dots, handprints and figure with modern owl and starbursts in a circle.

I end my personalised exhibition with the unexpectedness of a shower curtain, Melanie Forbes’ black and white “Tree of life” (digital print on PEVA) …

… and, for my daughter whose avatar is the quoll, Kim Charles’ “Spotted quoll” (acrylic on canvas).

Diversity

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ceramics, Dorothy Haig, fibre, photography, prints on silk, Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery

I wasted a beautiful warm Stanthorpe day – or did I? Instead of being outside, I enjoyed four different exhibitions in the Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery. The glass cases along the wall in the downstairs gallery contained an eclectic mix of ceramic, embroidery, copper and fibre. I was startled to see The shy little kitten, a favourite bedtime story with the Warsaw twins, and Tootle, also a favourite but definitely not at bedtime, (too much TOOOOTing), featured in the embroidery.

Leith Dillon: Hey, who ate the green salad?

Leith Dillon: Beetles, bugs and butterflies

Bernadette Will: Admiral’s arch

Merridy Webster: Landscape

Shirley Battrick: Then and now

Upstairs was an exhibition called Quilt!3 by Fibre Arts Australia which, says the catalogue, “moves the quilt off the bed and onto the wall”. I loved the movement and the shadows as the breeze, probably created by my passing, stirred the hangings, and not just the organza ones.

Judy Hooworth

Wendy Holland: Ruminative nuances

Julie Ryder: Lemon:Time.

Deborah McCardle: Curtain

There were two quilts that reminded me of the discussion about the place of background information in art a few weeks ago. The quilt made of baby cards with a featureless doll sitting in front of it meant nothing until I read the artists’s statement. This artwork is part of a long-drawn-out creative attempt to come to terms with her husband’s gender reassignment surgery. In her concept the doll is lying on the quilt, genderless.

Janice Appleton: The first question

The second one is a flimsy apron-like patchwork. Here the knowledge of the materials used deepens the meaning, and the beauty. The artist says “There’s something that draws me to rubbish. My current work continues my interest in other cultures and discarded materials. The fabric finds on the beach of Flores have already been used by fisherman for tying up their boats, and various other uses … I have fused the fabric scraps together using Kantha stitch which a traditional way of reinventing old saris … This much-used cloth now holds a story.”

Pamela Fisher: Fragile fragments

My favourite hanging was in strips, and very mobile. It took a long time to catch it in enough stillness to photograph: leaves imprinted on paint colour-cards. I would like something like this hanging in the space above my stairwell at home – wafting, leaved and earth-coloured (which maybe wouldn’t go with my warm pink.)

Jill Smith: Falling leaves

The third exhibition was impossible to photograph: intimate photos of African wildlife – lions drinking, zebras nuzzling, a bird in the act of catching an insect, a waterbird stepping it out over lilly pads – all behind highly reflective glass in a narrow room, crowded with women talking about their African experience, or that of someone they knew.

Photos by Frank Dalgety and Lesley Clark

The main exhibition was Morris mania, work by Dorothy Haig, stemming from William Morris’s belief that everyone should create art. Her images are drawn from nature: plasticine and digital prints on silk, hand-dyed with native hibiscus flowers, and olive, eucalypt, mulberry and mistletoe leaves. These exquisite pieces were what one of the participants in the workshop a few weeks ago claimed were craft, not art.

Frottage on habutai silk, hand-dyed with leaves of the mulberry tree

Frottage on habutai silk, hand-dyed with the leaves of the mulberry

So did I waste that perfect sunny day? I don’t think so!

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Art on Thursday

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Damien Hirst, Douglas Watson, Raphael, Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery, Stephen Baxter, William Robinson

Once I’d seen this poster, I knew I’d be booking in. “Free” enticed me, and so did the Mona Lisa revamp. Oh, and of course I want to know more about art. It was strange being back in student role, and finding myself as silent in a group as I was in university tutorials more than fifty years ago, for much the same reason: everyone else knew a lot more than I did. The one time I did try to say something, the words stuck in my throat. At least I could indulge in a bit of somewhat amused introspection about my odd self-consciousness and about the level of my appreciation of art, as we answered questions on worksheets: Do you like it? How does it make you feel? Is it art?

The two pieces we began with were images of Damien Hirst’s 1993 Turner-prize-winning Mother and child divided and Raphael’s 1505 Madonna of the meadow. Hirst’s are real cows in formaldehyde and boxed: my immediate questions were “Why bother? What for?” The Madonna was a lot more accessible because it came out of a tradition I’m familiar with, and therefore I could like it for landscape, relationships (especially between the two boys even if they are playing with a crucifix) and composition. I was aware that I might be missing meaning in iconography – the poppies, the strawberries, the colours – but I was fairly confident that I understood most of what I was looking at. Not so with the cows. I could invent meanings, but I could be sure only that they were inventions. Then we looked at two paintings owned by the gallery: Stephen Baxter’s 1991 Self portrait: Aggression and Douglas Watson’s 1979 Sunny interior.

Discussion of these two painting centred on colour, emotion, the frames, technique, and whether we’d want either of them hanging on our wall. I took against Sunny interior because of the blandness of the curtain on the left hand side, and because Grace Cossington-Smith uses a similar palette with far greater assurance. There was a great deal of discussion about whether the woman was a willing sitter, and the meaning of the expression on her face.group preference was for aggression. The last painting we looked at was in fact a bench, very much unoccupied. It proved to be the one we’d choose to. hang on our wall; the one with the most masterful technique; the one with the best tonal qualities. I was left with two questions: does it do anything a photo couldn’t do? and does it matter?

Of course we ran out of time before we got to what I really wanted: lengthy discussion of techniques, colour, meaning and context. In the end, there really wasn’t much connection between the poster and the session. When I got home, J asked the pertinent question: “What did you get out of it?” I had to sleep on it. After all, since the discussion I’d bought alpaca pellets, dog bones and human groceries. By the next day I had a few answers. It was interesting to consider what I think makes something art. Then I measured my two Carlos Barrios paintings against my own criteria, and found a lot of them inapplicable. And yet I was driven to buy those paintings. I enjoyed listening to the various ways other participants viewed a painting. The Storyteller invented a detailed story about characters: the Iconographer had knowledge about obscure rituals of prognostication; the Practitioner offered insights into the process of oil painting and started a discussion about art v craft and the painting v background knowledge; the Down-to-earth Man (painter and farmer) was willing to say “I hate it”; the Mathematician liked geometric shapes and knew a lot about composition; the Self-proclaimed Ignoramus (not me) still managed to offer an interesting perspective. I discovered that if I look long enough I see things a cursory glance doesn’t offer: I was staring at the five artworks for about two hours. Common sense of course, but I realised I dissipate my attention in galleries and don’t spend long enough scrutinising individual artworks. This reinforced my sense longstanding belief that there need to be benches in art galleries for proper contemplation As for modern art, I now realise clearly that often its aim is to shock, to push the boundaries, to provoke. I feel quite easy in refusing to play that game. I want artworks to express something I can understand and that I want to think about; I want the artist to be present in the work; I want beauty, very broadly defined. I’d rather look at William Robinson’s cows than Damien Hirst’s any day. (And I’d rather watch Babette’s feast than Magic Mike2.)

William Robinson: Farm construction, Rosie peeing

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Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery

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Davida Allen, Elizabeth Cummings, Jeff Makin, Jun Chen, Lisa Adams, Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery

This gallery suits my attention span beautifully. About 20 paintings, sparsely displayed, means I can pay due attention to each one without feeling overwhelmed. There are two current exhibitions: landscapes that have won the Tattersall Art Prize over the years, liberated from the Tattersall's club house in Brisbane as a travelling exhibition: and photographs from the Granite Belt Wine Country Photography Competition. There are also glass cases showcasing the works of local artists. All this in a spacious, low-ceilinged main room, and a smaller upstairs section.

The painting that spoke most to my own experience was the man painting the mountains, a tiny insignificant figure attempting to capture immensity: no image and no attribution because my photo was too blurry. Lisa Adams' tree swan appealed because fantasy was located very close to reality in a very real landscape, and I liked Davida Allen's improbable palette in Cattle in fog at sunrise and the luminosity of Jeff Makin's Rubicon Valley.

I'm attracted to the macro in paintings as I am in nature, so I've taken the liberty of segmenting a few paintings where the paint-work was particularly viscous, the brush strokes visible, and the colours rich as I savour the part as well as the whole: Elizabeth Cummings' Stradbroke noon and Jun Chen's Brisbane River.

The photos didn't hold as much interest because I can take photos, not as good as the ones exhibited, but in the zone. I cannot wield a paintbrush.

 

 

Lisa Adams: Cold wind

 

Jeff Makin: Rubicon Valley

 

Davida Allen: Cattle in fog at sunrise

 

Jun Chen: Brisbane River

 

Elizabeth Cummings: Stradbroke noon

 

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