In Maddock’s last work to be discussed here, TERRA SPIRITUS… with a darker shade of pale, she incised the entire coastline of the island of Tasmania, viewed as if approached from the sea, onto paper, which was then rubbed with red ochre. Neither a drawing nor a print, the mark we see is a line embossed into paper with a dentist’s steel probe, a line which would be invisible but for the colouring rubbed over it. The artist was going to make the drawings from a boat in the water but when she found out how impractical an idea that was she learnt how to use graph paper and maps to translate the coast into lines on paper. In a talk she gave on the way the work was made she told of collecting ochre locally around Launceston, of grinding it and mixing it with gum tragacanth, a traditional binder used in artist materials sometimes also called gum dragon, to make her own drawing pastels. She also made a bookbinder’s tool from a bone she took from a dead dog that she found on the road. She used the tool to polish the surface of the paper depicting the sea. This was important because she had read that the Aboriginal people believed that when they died their spirits went into the sea.
Beneath the coastline the names of places in Tasmanian Aboriginal languages appear in neat cursive script in a paler shade of ochre; beneath them in blind (un-inked) typesetting are European place names. This detailed work of fifty-one images is a massive undertaking, a labour of love. At the same time it is awkward and has something of the quality of a primer, a first attempt at something, in this case reflecting on co-ownership and joint naming rights. But there is a disparity here in that while the European names are clearly documented the Aboriginal place names are less numerous and less precisely known. The drawing is reminiscent of the coastline images drawn by explorers and cartographers, archetypal first views, full of the promise and unfulfilled dreams of a mirage, of landfall, of first recordings of first sightings, even though the land was already known by those who lived there. TERRA SPIRITUS is a slow and measured view of the land that seems to contain none of the intense emotion and memory of Colin McCahon’s Six days in Nelson and Canterbury, but its text layers create the sense of a soft murmuring, a slurring susurration of sound, something like that made by the sea when running onto the shore.
Colin McCahon often used words in his paintings, sometimes English, sometimes Maori. Frequently painted in black and white, McCahon’s words speak, but also just are. They exist as objects as much as they are words. Thus language becomes as solid as paint, as palpable as skin. The light behind McCahon’s words or the light coming through them puts them in vast geographic spaces set against the sky, and gives them a tremendous sense of movement and power. The eloquence, the potential wideness, of the words, of speech, becomes visible.
In the painting The Lark’s Song (a poem by Matire Kereama) that he made in black and white acrylic paint on hinged doors, McCahon transcribed words from the book The Tail of the Fish: Maori Memories of the Far North. According to Matire Kereama, an elder of the Aupori tribe who wrote the words down from memory, The Lark’s Song is the transcription of a popular children’s song – a rhyme, a challenge, a kind of charm that must be said in as few breaths as possible. She said that to imagine it you must think of being a child lying on the grass with other children and making up words for the songs of the birds flying and singing above you. Poet and critic Wystan Curnow puts it thus:
McCahon wants us to defer translation so that we see the language as opaque, not transparent, so that we are held suspended among voices of children, saints, poets and painters – in language as such, where origin and impulse, natural and cultural, Maori and European, are all to be apprehended, but only as being in translation.
This understanding of translation casts it as movement, process, an act of metamorphosis and transformation, an experience involving the body as well as the mind, and a generator of new ideas. At the very bottom of the painting McCahon quotes some words from a poem by Peter Hooper to invoke another person who talked to birds. He asks: ‘Can you hear me St Francis?’
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Because the paths from home are so well-worn we often get in the car and drive somewhere else for our morning walk. Sometimes we walk near where painter Dorrit Black lived, and pass the corner where she had her fatal accident. Often we go to a park near an oval where cricketer Donald Bradman once hit 330 runs in an afternoon and where Aboriginal people were last recorded as dancing in 1910. If we go to the foothills we walk on part of the Pioneer Women’s Trail where German girls and women walked all night, probably singing hymns, from Hahndorf carrying eggs and vegetables to sell at the Adelaide markets. At the creek at the base of the hill they are said to have washed their feet and put their shoes on. We climb the hill and the higher we get the more I can see of the white dunes on the other side of the gulf like mirages in the distance.
We often flush out flocks of birds hiding in the grass which only take to the air when we are almost upon them. Pink-chested galahs, magpies, sulphur-crested cockatoos, wrinkle-eyed corellas, all like to sit on the ground and ferociously dig into the soil with their beaks. When crested pigeons fly they make a creaky noise as if their wings are squeaking.
Tonight we walk after many hot days under a cool sky, at last, while pink, grey and white elephant, whale, lizard and rat shaped clouds slide over our heads. Sometimes I sing, sometimes we see people standing in the dark smoking, watering the garden or staring up at the sky. Occasionally I speak to someone and bring home stories, like the one about the house where a very frail old lady lives by herself, and when we look into her house before she closes the venetian blinds the dining room is formally set with silver candlesticks and decanters on the sideboard. Another woman was wiring together two panels of her corrugated-iron fence and told us that it didn’t need to last long as it wouldn’t be long before she was gone, that is to say dead. Then there was the man with his rake stuck up a tree bringing down the last leaves, too impatient to let them fall. And a house where a man was painting a paling fence and a small boy kept saying excuse me, excuse me and I didn’t realise he was trying to get my attention until he asked me, eventually shouting down the street: ‘What is the name of your dog?’ This is the question that all children ask.
DECEMBER
the drawing of correspondences
They say in Asia it is not a miracle to walk on water but on the earth.
Trinh T. Minh-ha
There’s a woodcut print of a dingo with a cheeky grin on my mantelpiece. I made it at the end of my first year of art school in 1982. It is black and reddish brown on off-white Japanese paper, an image of graphic vividness and energy. It is based on my drawing of a wooden dingo made at Aurukun in 1962.
When I visited the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra with my first year art school class we went there to do some drawing. The Institute was a short walk from the art school. Drawing was a large part of the curriculum; students in every workshop did hours, days, months and years of life drawing and general drawing, and printmaking students like me did even more drawing. At twenty-seven I was untrained in drawing and had the impossible dream of staying that way. I had a clear sense of the virtue of being raw, of using very basic materials, never using an eraser but turning mistakes into sense and being completely engaged, sincere, direct and never ever mannered. Each day our drawing lecturers would come up with a project for us to do, a different approach to drawing or different materials to see what we might do with them. A lot of the time I was both embarrassed and elated, not ‘good’ at art like most of the people around me but at last fulfilling my dream of being at art school, not wanting to be told what to do or how to do it, but to be initiated nonetheless.
For the excursion to the Institute of Anatomy I remember that rather than buying a drawing pad I prepared my own paper for the class. I bought large sheets of cartridge paper from the school shop and tore them, rather roughly, into rectangles that were about the size of an old half-carved woodblock plate I found in the art school bin to use as a drawing board. I attached the stack of paper to the board w
ith crocodile clips. I drew with a thick French 2B graphite stick, a wonderful soft silvery six-sided block of ‘lead’, like a pencil, only as thick as my forefinger and with no wooden casing, so it made my hands grey and gave them a faint scent of metal.
First we went to the Anatomy Gallery of the Institute where human and animal skeletons, babies and body parts in bottles strongly smelling of formaldehyde were lined up in cases, as well as articulated animal skeletons posed naturalistically on branches. In the Ethnographic Gallery on the other side of the courtyard were Aboriginal artefacts from all over Australia, and in a series of glass cases the very special sculptural works made by the Wik people and collected at Aurukun on Cape York by anthropologist Frederick McCarthy in 1962 on a trip he made especially to get them and to record the ceremonies that went with them on film and in photos.
A row of wooden catfish hung down from a structure as if they were being dried, a fat mullet was laid down like a club, a shark bared its teeth, several dingoes smiled, a plover stood with its wings outstretched, the elder and younger Apalach brothers stood side by side – the shorter one covered in white dots, the taller with spikes sticking out of his arms. There was also an echidna and a wallaby, and the crippled boy of Thaa’puunt. I drew them all with my graphite stick. I remembered the displays in the ANU archaeology department of ancient Greek golden earrings, fragments of delicate iridescent glass, and red and black ceramic shards from old Egyptian pots, and how they seemed to hold the past. I studied the forceful eloquent forms of the Wik sculptures and the way that they were put together with simple wooden plugs and mortice and tenon joints. They were painted red, black, white and soft ochre browns with gritty earth pigments, and they had teeth made from sharpened bones and eyes carved from wood or made from glass beads, buttons, seeds or shells. They were not mannered or slick but sincere and direct, made carefully but with energy and a direct informality, and without over-controlled or over-finished surfaces. I remembered the energy and vitality of animals in books I knew from those drawn by Hugo Lofting for Dr Dolittle, the Moomintrolls and other beings drawn by Tove Jansson for her books, John Tenniel’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, E.H. Shepard’s illustrations for Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows, May Gibbs’s images for Scotty in Gumnut Land, as well as underground comics featuring Zippy the pinhead, the Furry Freak Brothers and Mr Natural, all drawings showing how the angle of a mere line or dot can change the expression of a face and thus an entire story. All the stories of mythological beings and metamorphosis in a series of books at the local library of myths, legends and folk tales from around the world that I used to read repeatedly as a child many years before, also came together, and I drew.
Unschooled and unskilled I drew, crudely with trepidation and doubt, but with affection and attention straight from the heart. I especially remembered my dog Maud who had died the year before. Maud was a Staffordshire terrier whom I first met when she belonged to someone else and I thought she was the ugliest dog I had ever seen. We became very close and when her owners moved I became her new owner. Our friendship, based on walking, talking, being together and feeling loved, was very powerful and deep. In the concentration of drawing everything came together – observation, memory, feelings.
The next week back at the printmaking department, visiting Japanese woodcut artist Akira Kurosaki started to teach us the traditional way to make Japanese woodblock prints. First he instructed us to transfer a drawing to very fine transparent Japanese paper by doing a brush drawing in black ink over a pencil drawing, then when it was dry pasting that brush drawing face down onto a piece of wood and carefully cutting out with a knife and a chisel whatever was not black. Then we learned to print from the woodblock onto thin Japanese paper. First this involved registering the paper with lines cut into a separate L-shaped piece of wood which sat against one corner of the block so as to be able to centre the paper on the block and be able to replace it in that position for subsequent application of colours or another layer of ink. The black Japanese ink mixed with a watery rice glue was brushed onto the block with a wide brush. If you wanted grey you added more glue, or even water for a broken texture. After the paper was laid on top of the block a rubbing tool or traditional baren made from circles of cardboard and a coil of tightly wound string covered with a mottled bamboo leaf was rubbed hard on the back of the paper to transfer the ink to the paper. Each layer of ink had to be printed twice. ‘Nice image’, said Kurosaki.
Many people thought my dingo print was a comment on Azaria Chamberlain who was taken by a dingo at Yulara in 1980, though that had never occurred to me, but I knew there was a lot of Maud the Staffordshire terrier, her huge smile and sturdy body in it. And the ferocity inside her gentleness. Working in the printmaking workshop at the same time was Banduk Marika from Yirrkala making linocuts, and from north-central Arnhem Land brothers-in-law Johnny Bulun Bulun and Jack Wunuwun making their first lithographs. Several of the people who were staff or students at the Canberra School of Art at the time, such as Theo Tremblay, Basil Hall and Martin King, have famously gone on to work as master printmakers with countless indigenous artists all over Australia. Some fellow students questioned whether my print made from my drawing of the Aurukun dingo was appropriating Aboriginal culture so I asked Banduk what she thought. She recognised the dingo from its markings as coming from Cape York, but said that she thought that if you did not just copy something but made it your own it was OK, and that I had made it my own.
It is ironic that with my aversion to judgements and strict categories in art I began in 1988 to work as a freelance art critic. Not always happy in this role, I can certainly say that it has been a passionate one. One way or another I rarely write in a disengaged manner; I always seem to care too much and regularly feel horror and nausea as well as joy and pleasure, while trying always to remind myself that the business of art involves other factors beyond my emotions. Nevertheless I am stuck with them. At least I have learned not to say when an artist’s work makes me feel like throwing up. To each exhibition I try to bring a fresh eye to write about it for people who may never see it. I try to understand, to empathise in order to be able to convey the material and intellectual experience of the work. I imagine a person sitting at a table reading it, maybe somewhere remote, who will never see the art, having it brought to life in their minds by my writing and then taking it into their life as an experience that they may even tell other people about.
In pursuing my own artwork I swing widely between seeing what I am doing clearly and not knowing, between making work with fluency and sureness and having no idea what to do. I look earnestly in myself for just a little of the single-minded fortitude that I read in the eyes and the body of our dog every day, or the bird that sits cleaning its feathers outside my window. One thing I want is to find a way of communicating an identification with animals and plants and the non-human world, a vision of oneness or communion. Sitting very still and smoking a cigarette and then just breathing and hearing music in the wind is one way I used to merge with the world, but I rarely smoke these days.
I am talking about connection, about something that belongs to the earth and her inhabitants that is not the province of any one culture, something that Claude Lévi-Strauss described so well in Triste Tropiques:
During the brief interval in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, [let us grasp] the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society; in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.
Or a dog.
Through exhibitions, books, articles and catalogues Aboriginal art joins the art of other places in history, galleries, institutions and syllabuses, but it wo
uld be tragic if the new things, the different things, the fresh and important things that it has to teach us are lost in this incorporation. It is a located art that asserts emotional relationship to place at the same time as, in the most impressive works, engaging with interlocked graphic, aesthetic and conceptual concerns such as opacity and transparency, layering and juxtaposition. These are not merely formal concerns attached to any one culture or period of art in the world, they are features of human image-making in a world in which when paint dries, like water retreating from the edge of a lake, it leaves a certain pattern. They register on our senses and connect with our emotions sublingually, beneath language, as well as being metaphors for thought.
Aside from all its specific cultural connections Aboriginal art demonstrates that art begins from and returns to human experience in the natural world and engages with the task of integrating human experience within it in a social, personal and historical way. Aboriginal art does not speak to us from another world but from another culture responding to this world. The ability of a medium such as paint to speak, not only English, not only Warlpiri, not only Pintupi, French, German or Italian, but a series of graphic tongues with their origins in parts of the world around us such as the clouds, the lines on our hands and the rhythms of the earth we all see and know, are what make it possible for the art of a nomadic people who have been living on this land for thousands of years to be able to communicate with sedentary people who arrived recently bringing with them the habits and preconceptions of other places.
An artist who painted at Warmun (Turkey Creek) in the Kimberley in Western Australia, Rover Thomas, made artwork with the express purpose of strengthening and renewing culture, inventing it and making it new as well as drawing on old stories. Massacres and brutality feature in his art but you would never know they were there without the titles. In these works, history is shown to be a receptive space as wide as the land where it spreads its implications and its repercussions. Thomas’s paintings often have large patchy streaky surfaces of gritty, textured ground ochres mixed with tree gum. They show the artist’s working gestures, as well as implying vast emotional spaces and the abstract malleable texture of thought and memory.
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