17 FEBRUARY - 26 MARCH 2016FROM EARTH TO SPIRIT

Indigenous Art from Arnhem Land & the Tiwi Islands, NT

While culturally and linguistically distinct, the practices of mark making, painting and carving – with roots in storytelling and ceremony – are deeply embedded within Tiwi Islands and Arnhem Land cultural and spiritual traditions. As part of the oldest known living culture in the world, these artists and their ancestors have long been making artwork and imagery that expresses their profound knowledge of, and connection to, Country: its land, creation stories and ceremonies. It is through this atavistic connection that earth and spirit come together in almost every aspect of Indigenous life – universal law, ceremony, sacred sites, and in artworks that through their making become infused with ancestral power. The raw medium of natural ochres used for illustration and design, create artworks that are organic and of the everyday, as well as the ephemeral and otherworldly. From Earth to Spirit brings together art works from the University Collection and private collectors including bark paintings, ochres on canvas, works on paper, prints and carvings, that span more than 60 years of heritage and culture, a culture that has seen immense change during that time. From mid-twentieth century bark paintings, to contemporary paintings in new mediums, these significant works illustrate the ongoing complexity and richness of the visual and spiritual traditions of this part of the world. Naomi StewartCurator - From Earth to Spirit

From Earth to SpiritIndigenous art from Arnhem Land & the Tiwi Islands, NT

The University of Newcastle respects and acknowledges the Aboriginal Nations on whose traditional lands the university has presence, and the cultural significance and history of the land, its Custodians and Elders, past, present and into the future.

The University and Gallery acknowledges the Pambalong clan of the Awabakal people, on whose traditional land the gallery is built.

We respectfully advise Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander viewers that this exhibition and catalogue feature images and names of artists who have passed away and may contain culturally sensitive material from ancestors.

Earth: the land, connection to Country, the body, the ceremonial ground, sacred sites, animals, paint and materials: ochre, clay, bark, wood, ash, paper, stone

Spirit: the Ancestors, creation stories, traditional law, sacred sites, spirits in the land, ceremony, design, song, dance, knowledge

Arnhem Land is a vast region in the northeastern corner of the Northern Territory, covering an area of almost 100,000 km2. The East, Central and West Arnhem Lands are home to different inhabitants with distinct languages, cultural practices and artistic traditions. Further, the diverse landscapes across Arnhem Land are central to understanding the art and culture of its people; rocky escarpments to seasonal floodplains, open forests to dense jungles, freshwater lagoons to countless river systems leading towards the coast, all hold significance for connection to Country. The region’s main township is Nhulunbuy, 600km east of Darwin, though many people live in remote area outstations on their traditional country. Major population centres that are also active hubs for artists are Yirrkala (just outside Nhulunbuy), Gunbalanya (formerly

Oenpelli), Ramingining and Maningrida. Milingimbi, Groote Eylandt and Ngukurr that also have established art centres to support local artists. The Tiwi Islands are situated 80km north of Darwin, where Melville Island and Bathurst Island are home to the Tiwi. Sustained contact with outsiders only began in the 20th century, making Tiwi culture and ceremonial practice highly distinct from any other Indigenous group on the mainland. However, as with their Arnhem Land neighbours, the landscape in and around the islands are central to both everyday and spiritual life. It is this cared-for country through which ancestors travelled, created the seasons and marked their journeys, providing theTiwi people with sources of sustenance and artistic inspiration over countless generations.

NORTHERN TERRITORY

Thousands of rock painting sites scattered across Arnhem Land are testament to the ancient art traditions of people from this area. Ochres used for painting are taken locally from the earth and combined with water to create a paste: ochre or iron clay pigments produce red, yellow and white, while charcoal produces black. Arnhem Land is renowned for the bark painting, sculpture and weaving traditions of its artists, who continue to use natural earth pigments as their chosen medium to express their unique relationship with the land and its embedded stories. Artworks, like paintings on the body or rock face, serves as a vital link between people and the ancestral spirits. The inhabitants of Arnhem Land share their country with a range of supernatural beings who mark the landscape with their presence as sacred sites. Bark paintings made in the stone country of Western Arnhem Land often include naturalistic or figurative depictions of these ancestral and spiritual beings from the creation period (Djang), as well as significant animals and flora that inhabit the landscape.1 They include Ngalyod (omnipotent creative being, the rainbow serpent), yawkyawk (female water spirit, or mermaid), Namarrkon (lightning spirit), and mimih spirits (shy, slender figures who live in rocky escarpments. Aboriginal people in this region believe they painted the very first rock art).2

Art from Arnhem Land

Eastern Arnhem Land, around areas such as Yirrkala, is well known for a more geometric style of painting with filled in backgrounds, a similar method and use of raark known as dhulang or miny’tji.4

The artists of Yirrkala were among the first Indigenous Australians to recognise the potential use of of illustrated oral literature in the form of cultural designs as a political tool and put this into practice with the Yirrkala Church Panels and the Yirrkala Bark Petition that recorded Yolngu law and land ownership.5

For Yolngu artists, clan relationship to land and sea are highly important in determining what is rendered in paint, with both style and artistic subject also determined by moiety (social or kinship group) and the associated rights and responsibilities of the individual artist:

In this way, Yolngu artists are custodians of certain creation (Wangarr) stories and ceremonies that encompass specific land areas, sacred sites and determine relationships to other Yolngu, Sacred Beings and the natural world.

Kunwinjku (Gunwinggu) bark painters from Gunbalanya (Oenpelli) often depict these figures on monochrome backgrounds with blocks of raw colour and a linear or cross-hatching infill technique called raark: a method of imbuing the painting with the power of the beings depicted.3 The renowned Kunwinjku bark artist, Yirawala (below left), painted countless variations of his clan subjects, using the raark technique to great effect. Kuninjku painters from Maningrida and around Central Arnhem Land, have become known for painting figurative designs with more pronounced cross-hatching. Non-figurative designs associated with ceremony, body design and sacred sites, are also common and are used by innovative artists such as John Marwurndjul and Samuel Namundja (below), who use raark to fill the entire surface of their work, expanding the visual resonance of their ceremonial designs beyond the frame.

Everything in the Yolngu universe – Spirit Beings, plant and animal species, clan groups, areas of land and water are one of two moieties: either Dhuwa or Yirritja.6

Major sources of inspiration for artists of this remote region lie at the core of customary practice: the performance of two main life cycle ceremonies and the epic creation narratives of the Ancestors. Tiwi traditionally paint their bodies and objects for ceremony using natural earth pigments or ochres and this practice is a foundation for contemporary artmaking in the Tiwi Islands, where ochres are the medium used on carvings, as well as for modern paintings, textiles and works on paper to illustrate history, culture and personal stories. The annual Kulama ceremony, once primarily an initiation ceremony for men and women, now also functions to promote health and new growth or regeneration.7 Its association with various cycles of the natural and human world can be seen in the ways artists render circular forms when depicting this subject. Pukumani is the funerary rite performed by Tiwi, involving a series of ceremonies after a person’s death that culminates in the erection of tutini (grave posts) around the burial site.8 These poles, now also made as artworks for public viewing, represent the body of the deceased and/or an ancestral being associated with the mortuary ritual. Painting for Pukumani or about Pukumani, is a long-respected practice in Tiwi culture, thought to encapsulate the ‘poetics of mourning, while maintaining vital cultural knowledge.’9

The Tiwi word jilamara roughly translates as ‘design’ and refers to the intricate ochre patterning traditionally applied to the bodies of dancers and the surface of carved poles and other objects used during these ceremonies. Artists recreate these individual patterns in their art, often using a pwoja, or traditional wooden comb, to create series of finely dotted lines over a dark ground, or by using a brush for more irregular or spontaneous daubs of raw colour.10 This enduring relationship between the application of ochre to the body’s surface or ceremonial ground and the layering of paint onto the surface of art objects is shared and celebrated across many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Art from the Tiwi Islands For Tiwi people, ochre markings applied during important rites also relate to important characters from the creation period (Palaneri) whose epic tales underpin their understanding of past and present worlds. These beings can appear in artworks in pattern, human or animal form, and are used to relate oral stories about how the land, sea and Tiwi were made, as well as explaining the origins of Law and culture.

Three main art centres have supported Tiwi artists over the past few decades: on Melville Island, Jilamara Arts & Craft centre at Milikapiti and Munupi Art centre at Pirlangimpi, as well as Tiwi Design on Bathurst Island. The University Collection also holds a large number of works by artists from the Ngaruwanajirri art centre, founded in 1994 at Wurrumiyanga (formerly Nguiu) on Bathurst Island as an art focused skills development program for Tiwi adults with special needs. Ngaruwanajirri (‘helping one another’) is a collective of artists and creative individuals whose work has flourished over the past two decades and carved a unique place in the Tiwi art landscape.11 While many artists prefer to use classical Tiwi styles and subjects, others, such as Alfonso Puautjimi (right), draw inspiration from other aspects of everyday life such as cars, bicycles and street scenes.

1 Crossing Country: The Alchemy of Western Arnhem Land Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Exhibition Education Kit, 2004, unpaginated.

2 ibid.

3 Wally Caruana, ‘Patterns of Power: Arnhem Land and its surrounds,’ Aboriginal Art, 1993, Thames and Hudson: London, 27.

4 ibid 25.

5 Buku-Larrngay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala, http://www.yirrkala.com/buku-art-centre/about/history

6 Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation http://www.dhimurru.com.au/yolngu-culture.html

7 Margie West, ‘It belongs to no one else’: the dynamic art of the Tiwi, unpaginated.

8 ibid.

9 Judith Ryan, Timothy Cook, The Blake Prize 2011

10 Jilamara Arts and Crafts, http://www.site.jilamara.com

11 Anita Angel, Ngaruwanajirri: helping one another, exhibition catalogue, Charles Darwin University, 10 August – 7 October 2011

IMAGES:

FRONT and INSIDE LEFT: (top) Bob Bilinyara Nabegeyo, Kangaroo and Mimi Spirit, natural earth pigments on Eucalyptus bark (detail), donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Dr Milton Roxanas

BACK: Freda Warlapinni, Body Painting 2001, lithograph

INSIDE TOP LEFT: (bottom) Yirawala, Ubarr Ceremony 1958, natural earth pigments on Eucalyptus bark (detail), donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Dr Milton Roxanas

INSIDE TOP RIGHT: (top) Tom Djumburpur, Turtles, natural earth pigments on Eucalyptus bark (detail), donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Dr Milton Roxanas; (bottom) Samuel Namundja, Gungurra 2005, etching (detail)

INSIDE BOTTOM LEFT: Raelene Kerinauia, Kayimwagakimi Jilamara 2002, natural ochres on bark (detail), donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Dr Milton Roxanas

INSIDE BOTTOM RIGHT: (top left) Timothy Cook, Kulama 2010, woodblock print on Japanese rice paper; (middle left) Alfonso Puatjimi, Town 2013, natural ochres on paper; (middle right) Lillian Kerinaiua, Untitled, natural ochres on paper

REVERSE FOLD OUT: Lorna Kantilla, Untitled 2013, pen, ink and watercolour on Arches paper