The diversity of My Country

Visitors to My Country: Contemporary Art from Black Australia often express surprise at the innovative nature of Australian Indigenous art, and that contemporary art by Indigenous Australians includes more than abstract painting. Urban, art school trained artists create work in every media imaginable. Artists from remote areas are recognised for taking traditional practices – sand drawing, body painting, decoration of burial poles and functional objects – and reconceiving them in new and fresh ways, while conveying the importance of the mythological and recent history of their land and politically declaring Indigenous rights.

In this blog I want to explore the ways in which the artists in My Country are groundbreaking and, in particular, how their innovation is endorsed by the awards and acknowledgements they have received.

Alick Tipoti, Kukyu Garpathamai Mabaig 2007

Alick Tipoti is from Torres Strait and his work in My Country exemplifies the acclaimed status of artists in the exhibition. Tipoti is an expert in linocut printing (a Western technique that he has helped to introduce to islanders). Tipoti has developed an extremely creative and articulate style of print making, which conveys his traditional culture to his people and to the rest of the world. He was Student of the Year during his art training (1993), and since then his works have attracted a list of accolades, including over five annual National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, culminating in the Senior Artist Award and Artist of the Year in 2012. In 2011 Tipoti also won the British Council’s Indigenous Leadership Award. His amazing work in My Country, Kuyku Garpathamai Mabaig, 2007, which depicts a head hunter with his weapons communicating with the spirit of his victims, won the Freemantle Print Award.

Genevieve Grieves is a young artist from New South Wales. She is representative of younger generations of Indigenous artists who have grown up in urban areas, gone to art school and who use contemporary media in their art making. Grieves five-channel video Picturing the Old People, 2006–7 is based on archival studio photographs of Indigenous people. Picturing the Old People won the Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award 2007. Making these videos at the age of 30, Grieves worked collaboratively to include relatives of the people depicted in the original images in her animation and disruption of the historical photos.

Warwick Thornton, Stranded 2011

Distance within the huge Australian continent, or from the rest of the world, is no deterrent to talent. Internationally acclaimed Indigenous Film maker Warwick Thornton was brought up in Alice Springs, and as a teenager lived in Australia’s only monastic town (New Norcia, WA). His 2009 film Samson and Delilah won Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, when Thornton was in his late thirties. While continuing his directing career, Thornton was commissioned by Telstra to make a work the for 2011 Adelaide Film Festival. He created the hard-hitting yet beautiful 3D film Stranded, 2011, which is presented in My Country and is his only work made for a gallery space.

Youth, however is not a perquisite for Indigenous Australian achievement in contemporary art, as works by numerous artists in My Country demonstrate. The painting Euro tracks, 2011 by Dickie Minyintiri won the 28th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award in 2011, out of over 300 entries. This subtle painting of multiple layers and colours represents Minyintiri’s personal memory of travel in his country and expresses his ancestral relationship to the land in the stories of a sacred men’s ceremonial site. Amongst the network of lines are traces of the tracks of ancestral spirits (kangaroos, dogs, emu) to important waterholes.

This decorated artist reinforces the ageless nature of success. At almost 100 years old (born 1915) Minyintiri is the oldest artist in Ernabella, SA, and his paintings are found in all the Australian state galleries. The formal painting career of this senior man, responsible for many traditional laws, only began in 2005 when Dickie was almost 90.

Eighty-eight-year-old Sally Gabori won the inaugural $50,000 Gold Award presented by Rockhampton Art Gallery in 2012 with a painting similar to but smaller than her work Dibirdibi Country, 2008, in My Country. More remarkable is that Gabori commenced painting only five years earlier. She rapidly followed this success by winning the Togart Contemporary Art Award 2012 and seeing her work enter many public gallery art collections including, the Musée de Quay Branley in Paris. Gabori paints the shoreline where she grew up on Bentnick Island, northern Queensland, a home from which missionaries removed her and her family in 1948.

My Country includes art by the key figures who established a creative and economic pathway for others, especially women.

One such entrepreneurial artist is Emily Kngwarreye, whose work Wild Potato Dreaming, 1990 appears in My Country. Born in 1910, Kngwarreye ignored the impediments of distance and social and economic disadvantage to succeed in taking up painting as a career, commencing her art practice just prior to reaching the age of 80. Kngwarreye was living in the community of Utopia, 350 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs. The medium of acrylic on canvas was only introduced to Utopia in 1988. Kngwarreye’s paintings of her yam dreaming, which she said include ‘everything’ (meaning her ancestral links, the aspects of culture she has custodianship over and the country where she lives) have set new records for the price and national and international recognition of Aboriginal art in general.

Australian Indigenous people had not adopted the European materials of paint and canvas until 1971 when school teacher Geoffrey Bardon introduced these art tools to men in the Papunya community, located 250 kilometres west of Alice Springs. When Kngwarreye began painting in 1989 she forged her own style which was distinct from that of the men painting in Papunya. By 1990, she had five solo exhibitions and 12 group exhibitions in Australia – a trailblazing feat by a woman who had not left the central desert area of the continent before beginning her art career. Prime Minister Paul Keating acknowledged Kngwarreye’s achievements when he presented her with the Australian Artists Creative Fellowship in 1992, making her the first Indigenous artist to receive this prestigious award.

In remote parts of Australia painting is a way in which Indigenous people stay connected to culture, and provides an occasion for singing ancestral and past stories, and a time to pass down knowledge and carry on custodial duties in regard to land. Australia was, as you will know, presumed to be terra nullius or land belonging to no one by the colonial settlers who arrived in the 18th century. The paintings of Kngwarreye, like other artists, have broken new ground in demonstrating evidence of a prior connection to country, and have been accepted as evidence in Land Trials. In this way, painting has assisted communities, including Utopia, to gain freehold title to their territory.

My Country is indicative of the fact that there is no single characteristic of professional and economic achievement. The photos Black Gum, 2008, which reflect on colonial perceptions of Indigenous Australians, are by Christian Thompson, the first Aboriginal Australian to be admitted to Oxford University in its 900-year history.

Vernon Ah Kee speaking in front of his work, neither pride nor courage 2006,  at Auckland Art Gallery, Saturday 29 March 2014

Vernon Ah Kee recently won the 2014 Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize for the style of charcoal drawing on canvas that is seen in his large triptych neither pride nor courage, 2006 in My Country. The third part of this triptych shows the face of the future – it is a portrait of Ah Kee’s son. This boy exemplifies changes since the artist’s own start in life – Ah Kee was born in 1967, just before a referendum in which Aboriginal Australians were granted the right to vote, and the first time they became full citizens in their own land.

The artists in My Country indicate the many ways in which art can be a means to not only survive but also flourish. Through their art these artists acknowledge the importance of past and current communities in contemporary life, and engage others with culture in new and inventive ways. I leave you with an image of the installation I Forgive You, 2012 by Bindi Cole, an artist who had won the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards in 2007 and 2009 when she was in her early thirties. Made from thousands of emu feathers, I Forgive You is literally – and figuratively – multi-layered. One meaning that we can take from this work, and from other art in My Country, is that the success and integrity of any person is interconnected with those who form our worlds and countries.

– Zara Stanhope, Principal Curator and Head of Public Programmes

Additional notes:

Richard Bell
A painting very similar to Richard Bell’s Theorum (Tricky Dicky and Friends) on view in My Country won Bell the National Telstra Indigenous Art Award (2003). 

Michael Cook
Artist of the Civilised series, photographer Michael Cook, is a two-time winner of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Awards in recent years.

Image credits:


Alick Tipoti
Kala Lagaw Ya people
Australia  QLD  b.1975
Kuyku Garpathamai Mabaig  2007
Purchased 2008. The Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant

Warwick Thornton
Kaytej people
Australia  NT  b.1970
Stranded 2011
Purchased 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation

Vernon Ah Kee
Kuku Yalanji/Waanyi/Yidinyji/Guugu Yimithirr people
Australia  QLD  b.1967
neither pride nor courage  2006
The James C Sourris, AM, Collection. 
Gift of James C Sourris through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2007. Donated through the 
Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program

Vale Gordon Bennett (1955–2014)

Gordon Bennett Home decor (Algebra) Daddy's little girl 1998

Australian artist Gordon Bennett broke new ground with his distinctive images which commented on local and global issues and questions of contemporary existence. Art offered a means of communication for Bennett that was not possible through other channels. He sought out art, undertaking a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art in his hometown of Brisbane at Queensland College of Art. He developed a language in painting and printmaking to interrogate the colonial history of Australia, which was significant in Bennett’s own life. A prolific outpouring of images during the late 1980s and 1990s tapped into postcolonialism and poststructural rethinking of established histories and discourses.

Both commercial and institutional representation were important for the public awareness of Bennett’s practice. Thanks to his gallerists, Bennett’s work had regular presentations in Brisbane and Melbourne, as well as Sydney and Adelaide. His paintings, works on paper and videos were the subject of solo exhibitions in Australia, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Bennett’s works appeared in major exhibitions including dOCUMENTA 13, Germany (2012); the 9th and 12th Biennale of Sydney (1992 and 2000); The Third Asia Pacific Triennal, Brisbane (1999), and a long list of other significant exhibitions.

Bennett’s art was significant for its stand on big issues, as well as its ability to get highlight elements of everyday existence. His reflections on the myths perpetuated in Australian history, such as terra nullius, and attitudes towards Australian Aboriginal people, raised audience awareness of identity politics and the need to re-examine colonial and modern narratives. Bennett’s images of lost explorers seeking the apocryphal inland sea, references to the perspectival tools and mapping of European Enlightenment and the negation of Indigenous presence remain imprinted on viewers. Bennett’s practice was important for artists as well as audiences, setting a significant example of an artist unafraid to engage with the contemporary issues of race, sovereignty and citizenship for emerging Australian Indigenous artists.

Gordon Bennett Notes to Basquiat: Double vision 2000

Bennett remained attuned to the ideological effects of language, images, media and other forces on contemporary life. In recent years, works such as the Camouflage images or the seminal Notes to Basquiat paintings engaged with newer currents in our existence – fear and terror as they were amplified after 9/11 and the Second Gulf War. In these, like his abstract grid paintings of the last decade, Bennett invited viewers to identify undercurrents of meaning and create broader associations.

Bennett’s art was contemporary in more than just its subject matter. In larger series of paintings he worked in a cut-and-paste mode, drawing on other artists’ imagery, and also recycling motifs across time and works. This strategy of appropriation and self re-deployment could be interpreted as a reversal of appropriation – an act on behalf of a people whose history includes the loss of land and the ‘Stolen Generation’. References to the paintings of Piet Mondrian and de Stijl artists in Bennett’s Home Decor works, in which images from Australian modernist artist Margaret Preston’s designs also figured, operated in this way. Aspects of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s imagery regularly reappeared, in homage and sympathy, in this case.

In recent years Bennett also painted under the name John Citizen, a nom de plume that suggests the everyman. Citizen was the artist of the Interior paintings, images abstracted from photographs published in lifestyle magazines. Strangely coloured (often painted with leftover studio paints), these urban interiors evoke the banality of material culture resulting from regarding one’s consumer status as a contemporary social aspiration.

Art and ideas are poorer with the loss of Gordon Bennett on 3 June 2014. His practice stimulated thinking across many areas of the humanities and broke new ground in art engaging with contemporary issues in the West. Bennett’s practice will continue to provide a productive challenge to audiences and evidence the social value an artist can bring by mining untold narratives and visualising under-represented histories.

– Zara Stanhope, Principal Curator, Head of Programmes

Image credits: 

Gordon Bennett
Home decor (Algebra)
Daddy’s little girl 1998
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
182.5 x 182.5 cm
Private Collection, Melbourne

Gordon Bennett
Notes to Basquiat: Double vision 2000
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
152.3 x 182.7 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of Henry Gillespie, Governor, 2000.

Images courtesy of Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Papunya Tula art from the Chartwell Collection

Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri,  Budgerigar Dreaming At Ilpitirri 1987 

Soon after my family and I moved to Sydney in 1999, I started as a volunteer at the Mosman Art Gallery. Not long after, a touring exhibition of work from Papunya Tula artists opened at the gallery and I was asked to take a tour of the show for the public.

I was somewhat astounded as I did not know anything about Papunya Tula art, couldn’t find relevant locations on a map, and had never visited that part of Australia or knew any of the artists. How could I take this tour based on zero knowledge but a lot of curiosity to learn? I decided the best policy was to ask people in the group that arrived for the tour, to take ME on the tour instead and it worked really well as people in the group had all sorts of connections and knowledge of the place and the artists and I started to learn about the history of the Papunya Art movement.

So my limited knowledge of Papunya Tula began, more from an exploratory position of unknowing, if you like: from the position of the outsider wanting to learn more.

Now, many years later, with the opening of My Country at Auckland Art Gallery, I have revisited the work and this time, I had the Aboriginal works from the Chartwell Collection to draw on when considering the influence and impact of the Papunya Tula art movement on Australian art.

Over the years, my father Rob acquired some major works by Aboriginal artists for the Chartwell Collection. This is a collection of New Zealand and Australian contemporary art held on long-term loan at Auckland Art Gallery and it holds fine examples of works by major Papunya Tula artists such as Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Charlie Tjaruru Tjungurrayi and Mick Namerari Tjapaltjarri, all senior artists who were involved in the establishment of the Papunya Tula Pty Ltd in the early 1970s.

Recently, researcher Ariane Craig-Smith looked into the development of this collection of work and wrote about it on the Chartwell Collection website. (Ariane Craig-Smith, 2014: www.chartwell.org.nz)

As Ariane noted, it was very unusual to be looking at Aboriginal work in the 1980s – especially coming from a collecting perspective in New Zealand. As Rob Gardiner explained to her, it was about that time that he was visiting Australia regularly to see major exhibitions and purchase works for the Collection. ‘Trips were planned to include visits to galleries showing contemporary Aboriginal artists and I was also interested in the work of Australian artists Ian Fairweather and Tony Tuckson,’ Rob explains. Driving his interest in the painting process and style of Fairweather, Tuckson, and the Aboriginal painters, was his curiosity about mark-making and the picture surface, which firstly drew him to the works of Papunya Tula artists, then to the astonishing work of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, which he first discovered at the Utopia Gallery. As he describes it, ‘at the time there was a perception that one should understand and respect the meanings and stories driving Aboriginal works, from an anthropological point of view. But I was encountering these works without that knowledge and could only respond by empathy with their formal content, the energy of their marks, and the painterly languages involved.’

Mick Namerari Tjapaltjarri Untitled 1994

Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Charlie Tjaruru Tjungurrayi and Mick Namerari Tjapaltjarri were integral to the development of the Papunya Tula art movement, meeting the teacher Geoffrey Bardon when he arrived to teach at the local school in Papunya in 1971. The Central Desert government settlement of Papunya is 240 kilometers north west of Alice Springs. As a result of the Government’s assimilation policies, Papunya was the last of the Aboriginal reserves to be set up by the Federal Government in 1961. By the time Bardon arrived, it was a community of over 1000 people beset by poor living conditions, health problems and great inter-tribal conflicts between groups. Bardon started to work on art projects with the children and this work was to become a matter of interest to the Aboriginal adults such as Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, the school yardman, and village councillors such as Mick Namerari Tjapaltjarri. They were intrigued by the painting he was encouraging in the classroom with the children and later were among the group involved in the establishment of Papunya Tula Pty Ltd.

Initially using available school supplies of poster paint, paint brushes and paper, as well as found boards and off cuts, the rapidly growing group of artists produced a lot of work over a short, intensive period of painting, including the creation of five murals at the school: A Practice Dreaming, Widows Dreaming mural, Wallaby Dreaming mural, Snake Dreaming mural and the Honey Ant Dreaming in two versions.

Years later, in the late 1980s, these artists’ careers developed further with Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri representing Papunya Tula artists on several international cultural exchange projects and travelling to New York in 1988 for the opening of the ‘Dreamings’ show at the Asia Society Gallery. This was the year after he painted the work now in the Chartwell Collection. Charlie Tjaruru Tjungurrayi was the first Papunya artist to have a retrospective exhibition, held at Orange Regional Gallery in 1987, the same year Chartwell acquired his work.

Jonathan Jones untitled (sum of the parts) 2010/2014

More recent acquisitions to Chartwell include the fluorescent tube, light installation by Jonathan Jones, untitled (sum of the parts), 2010, currently on show in Auckland Art Gallery’s north Atrium, and the digital work, Light Painting (2010–11), by Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. Just as Billy Stockman Tjapatljarri was one of the first artists to begin painting large-scale canvases in the 1970s, these artists are exploring technology in new ways.

– Sue Gardiner, Chartwell Trust

Image credits:

Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri
Budgerigar Dreaming At Ilpitirri 1987
acrylic on linen
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 1987 

Mick Namerari Tjapaltjarri
Untitled 1994
acrylic on linen
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 1995 

Jonathan Jones
untitled (sum of the parts) 2010/2014
fluorescent tubes, wiring, electrical cable
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2010

The hardest words to say…

Tony Albert, Sorry 2008, Found kitsch objects applied to vinyl letters,
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Image courtesy: QAGOMA 

My Country includes artworks that directly comment on Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 Apology to members of the Stolen Generations and their families. Tony Albert’s Sorry, 2008, spells out the climax of Rudd’s speech in large black type, but reverses the word to read YRROS and in doing so calls into question the effect of the Apology. For Albert, ‘Sorry is just a word which means nothing if it is not backed up by real outcomes.’ The objects that decorate this text – ashtrays, plates and other pieces of Aboriginalia – were picked up by the artist in second-hand stores. They show a persistent representation of Aboriginal bodies in items of Australian home décor and tourist souvenirs. Male figures dominate – a figure holding boomerang and spear faces off against a kangaroo on a cork beer mat in one of many examples of that ethnographic stereotype, the ‘noble warrior’. Stereotypes such as this, authored by someone else, erase individuality. They do not reflect the realities for the Stolen Generations, or those before them. Covering arguably the most important word of Rudd’s Apology in the material which helped build a generalised and damaging perception of Aboriginal people offers uncomfortable visual evidence of why the Apology was necessary.

A group of works in the exhibition bring the realities of those generations and families affected by racist laws and practices to light, bridging the gap between collective and individual histories and emphasising the personal with artworks which embody specific familial stories and practices. Some of these works relate to the body, recalling objects that were worn or carried, and convey a sense of everyday realities – their physicality evokes the spirit of the individual and their daily struggles.

Dale Harding, Unnamed 2009, lead and steel wire
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Image courtesy: QAGOMA 

Dale Harding’s Unnamed, 2012, a lead breast plate inscribed with his grandmother’s new name – ‘W38’ – connotes the harsh treatments and the specific use of ‘king plates’ as a method of identification. The rust and weight of the object with its alphanumeric code symbolises the dehumanising process of classification and control; its decayed surface suggests a forgotten or buried history. Looking at the breastplate gives us a sense of connection with Harding’s grandmother, and we empathise with the indignity she would have felt being forced to hang the large, heavy plate around her neck and having her name replaced by a code.

Wilma Walker, Kakan (Baskets) 2002 (installation view) 

Individual stories are powerfully communicated in works which convey a sense of the physical presence of the body. Wilma Walker’s Kakan (Baskets), 2002 recalls the baskets made by her mother. As a baby, Walker was hidden in baskets like these to avoid being forcibly removed from her family – to avoid becoming one of the Stolen Generations. Looking at the baskets’ bulbous forms we can easily imagine her tiny body curled up inside and covered by leaves.

Foreground Wilma Walker, Kakan (Baskets) 2002,
background Tony Albert, Sorry 2008 (installation view) 

One of the most striking moments in the exhibition is the presentation of these baskets in front of Tony Albert’s Sorry. Here, the life of someone personally affected by a state policy in practise confronts Rudd’s Apology, as interpreted by Albert. Walker’s handmade baskets, infused with the memories of her early life and with the making traditions of her people, evoke a sense of intimacy and human frailty and contrast the brittleness of the mass-produced Aboriginalia in Sorry. Both works remind us of trauma suffered and together create a confronting reminder about the need to honestly face historical facts.

Bindi Cole, I forgive you 2012, Emu feathers on MDF board
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Image courtesy: QAGOMA

In the exhibition’s final room Bindi Cole’s response to the 2008 Apology is writ large in emu feathers attached to letters. The sensual and protective qualities of I forgive you, 2012 – its layers of soft plumage – look capable of absorbing shock, which in forgiving one must do. Like Wilma Walker’s baskets, I forgive you was made by hand, each feather stuck down individually to create each word of the powerful sentence. In contrast to the critical position of Albert’s Sorry, and its seeming rejection of the Apology, Cole’s feathered forgiveness is empowering – reconciling differences and opening the door for future relations. According to Cole, ‘forgiveness is about taking your power back . . . no longer allowing that thing that hurt to live inside you.’

– Julia Waite, Assistant Curator, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki 


Image credits:

Tony Albert
Girramay people
QLD b.1981
Sorry 2008
Found kitsch objects applied to vinyl letters
99 objects: 200 x 510 x 10cm (installed)
The James C Sourris, AM, Collection
Purchased 2008 with funds from James C Sourris through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation

Dale Harding
Bidjara and Ghungalu peoples
QLD  b.1982
Unnamed 2009
Lead and steel wire
35 x 26 x 3cm
Gift of Julie Ewington through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2013

Wilma Walker
Kuku Yalanji people
QLD  b.1929 d.2008
Kakan (Baskets)  2002
Twined black palm (Normanbya normanbyi) fibre (basket), with lawyer cane (Calamus sp.) fibre (handle)
Three baskets:  93 x 37 x 36cm;  77 x 29 x 26cm;  68 x 32 x 31cm
Commissioned 2002 with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant

Bindi Cole 
Wathaurung people 
VIC b.1975 
I forgive you 2012 
Emu feathers on MDF board 11 pieces: 100 x 800cm (installed, approx.)
Purchased 2012. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation