But there is an odd aspect to this success story: it has been developing under the radar of the ultra-heated Aboriginal art market. Ernabella is not a name on the lips of modish curators and up-to-the-minute gallerists: the spare, distinctive sgraffito vases now being made by Davey, and the jewel-like works of Nyukana “Daisy” Baker, made using batik decoration techniques, are finding their way to buyers and admirers in quiet, almost secret fashion. There are intriguing reasons for this palpable absence of public enthusiasm.
First, the most distinctive quality of these ceramic objects – their hybrid aspect, their fusion of classical shape and indigenous line – seems to tell against them in an art domain where the authentic and the unmediated are the key values.
Ernabella Arts is the oldest indigenous art centre in Australia – it was set up in 1948 – and has a somewhat musty reputation. While other art centres have focused entirely on works on canvas, over the years Ernabella has spread its efforts and produced pieces in a bewildering variety of forms: weaving, prints, carvings, batik.
This choice has lent its output the flavour of craft, and the museums and galleries that have promoted and responded to the new ceramics tend to be those on the craft “circuit” – the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, JamFactory in Adelaide.
Lastly, Ernabella has another reputation, as one of the most dysfunctional communities in remote Aboriginal Australia, a bleak capital of petrol-sniffing.
Private collectors don’t make the trip down the Victory Downs road to share this particular Dreaming at first hand. All these factors help disclose the rise of the Ernabella ceramics movement for the little miracle it is, made possible by dedicated artists, and by sustained help from a large supporting cast. Adelaide ceramic artist Robin Best began working here in the late 1990s, introducing underglaze techniques that paved the way for the creation of an initial generation of bright, pastel-coloured pieces.
Ceramic work struck an immediate chord with many of the senior artists, chief among them Nyukana Baker, the batik queen. Best did further workshops; a group show in Adelaide followed. Soon a kiln was brought up to Ernabella. The then minister for indigenous affairs Philip Ruddock visited and allocated funds for fresh equipment.
The long-time arts co-ordinator at Ernabella, Hilary Furlong, who presided over this evolution, was watching with mounting excitement and the sense she might be on the edge of something new. “In the back of my mind I was looking for ways to build on what we had been doing,” she says. “Painting has never been central to arts practice at Ernabella: it’s been just one of a number of equally enjoyed activities. And it was obvious that the artists liked ceramics – the form spoke to something in them. We could see we were on to something lovely and unique.”
At the Desert Mob group exhibition in Alice Springs in 2003, the first set of fine art vases went on view. The reaction was immediate, and strong, just as it was at the first dedicated ceramic shows held in Sydney and Adelaide over the next couple of years. By this stage, the double shape of the ceramic movement had become clear.
The sgraffito style pioneered by Davey allows the artists to make deeply scored marks on pale grounds. These pieces tend to show bush foods – fruits such as ili (wild figs), wayanu (quandong) and kampurapa (bush tomato). They will often be twined with leaves, and decorative, abstract shapes. The art is in the placement of motifs, and the gravity and grace of the resultant design calls to mind, in a distant way, Greek vases or Mayan ware.
Individual artists evolve different methods: Davey’s eagerness for this form, which has much in common with old-established Pitjantjatjara wood-carving techniques, is matched by the sisters Carol and Tjimpuna Williams, Tjunkaya Tapaya and Renita Stanley. The second style is based on batik, and exploits the lost wax technique.
This is the province of Baker and her follower Alison Carroll: it yields intricate, wavy decorations and lends itself to synthetic composition. Some of the batik vases interweave traditional desert symbols and quasi-abstract patterns in the most evocative and haunting fashion, and seem to portend a wholly original visual language.
“In my secret heart I thought this would be a goer, but the enormous response by private individuals to this work took me by surprise,” Furlong says. “I didn’t realise how strongly people would react. I grasped that we were on the right path. But how to advance?”
Furlong made her case to officials from the South Australian Premier’s Department, persuasively. Co-operation on projects with Arts SA has begun; the state government has poured in some $300,000 to support the high cost of the kiln and technical equipment. The ceramics movement is on the way to being profitable, operating on a twin system of making mid-range and high-end work.
Craft pieces might cost less than $100, but a top-grade large vase will sell for $2,000 or more. The art centre aims to make two or three such “fine art” pieces a week during the production phases of its year, and there is a pleasingly substantial backlog of orders waiting to be filled. Talented outside experts have stood behind this ascent: first, Adelaide ceramic artist and teacher Peter Ward, and, more recently, studio master Geoff Crispin.
But already a campaign is under way to bring young Aboriginal men into the movement and to make them responsible for the demanding cycle of fabrication and firing: to give them a sense of emotional ownership. Early signs are promising. This makes Ernabella Arts a rare point of light in the drear social environment of the eastern Pitjantjatjara lands, and it explains the ardent backing of the government in Adelaide, and the personal commitment of Premier Mike Rann.
Furlong, who departed Ernabella in late 2006, after six devoted years, believes the ceramic movement is well set to make continued gains. “We don’t talk much about this, but I observe, and I’ve come to know people here well,” she says. “I observe that people love handling the clay, in both its raw form and its fired form. It’s a sensory pleasure to work in this medium, one which isn’t only visual but also tactile.
“I’m particularly struck by the sinuous line of the sgraffito pieces, how pleasing it is to the eye; and in the batik vases I’m struck by the effortless, singing flow of the design. This is very powerful art, and the finest pieces are quiet, but have an internal force.”
Pattern on ground; etched leaf shape on curved form. These are things that meet the eye, too, when you drive out into the Mus-grave Ranges, with the artists, on a bush tobacco gathering quest, and when you return, at dusk to Ernabella community, with the cloud and sunlight dappling the bare, terracotta-coloured hills – and the petrol-sniffers begin emerging, bleary-eyed, to walk the streets. You take refuge, with much sadness, and wonder how, from such chaos and devastation, beauty so pure can mount.
Bidyadanga
BRICK RED, WAVE BLUE, FLESH PINK, bone white: the colour palette in the new art from remote Bidyadanga is all the vibrant surface – but also, as things prove, the key to its inmost, disquieting depths.
When, in 2002, a small group of elderly artists from this northwestern Aboriginal coastal community began painting, it was the force of their colours, above all else, that seized the eye.
Many connoisseurs and followers of indigenous art’s newest currents were shocked, even repulsed, by the harsh, clashing hues on those early canvases. No one could argue that artists such as Weaver Jack, Donald Moko and Jan Billycan, all members of the desert Yulparitja tribe who had been brought in during the 1960s, were not authentic. Their sense of colour, though, the oozy greens, the mud greys and bright purples, where had they come from? Not, surely, from the red sand-dunes and bleached salt lakes of their Great Sandy Desert home? As the Bidyadanga painters held an initial run of capital city exhibitions, and the puzzled, overwhelmed responses to their work began, the question of colour played increasingly on the mind of the young woman helping to guide their movement – Broome gallerist Emily Rohr.
Most artists painting in desert art centres are offered a relatively restricted range of colours: usually acrylics c
entred on sand and ochre shades. The result is paintings the art market can easily recognise. Rohr and art teacher Kim Rheuben, though, had sat down with the Bidyadanga artists, soon after being invited into their world, and had developed, at the painters’ insistence, a distinctive colour range: deep blues and greens, which reflected the Indian Ocean shoreline near their community; blazing reds and bright golds that mimicked desert flowers; mauves, carmines, even a range of elusive, almost vegetal hues, which bear names such as pale avocado and slime green.
“At first,” remembers Rohr, “it seemed fairly obvious to me that the artists were painting desert iconography – waterholes and sand-dune landscape – only they were using saltwater colours. They would even ask for colours like the blue you see in a wave as it begins to break and turn.”
That made perfect sense, for the great theme of the Bidyadanga artists is their exile. Much like the Walmajarri painters of Fitzroy Crossing, the Yulparitja left their country a generation ago and found shelter in a Christian coastal mission, Cape Lagrange. For the old Yulparitja men and women, painting, taken up so late in their disrupted lives, became an exercise in nostalgia and in urgent, imaginary repossession. As they progressed and their work gained in assurance, the artists began to say that their far-off deserts were coming alive again and that traditional law was being reactivated in those empty landscapes. The Bidyadanga paintings evolved almost by the month. At first Weaver Jack, the undisputed leader of the movement, painted only skeletal outlines of her country. Then, gradually, dotting came in, and those dots were Weaver’s ancestors: she was reclaiming and re-peopling her land.
Other painters followed suit. There is a shared tone to the art being made in Bidyadanga, in large part because all the senior painters lived, for years, together in the community’s aged-care home, where they could watch and absorb each other’s works in progress. Alma Webou, perhaps the most dramatic colourist among them, perfected her trademark mix of flesh pink, candy and orange on black, bare ground; Weaver resorted more and more to purples and deep greens; and traditional healer Jan Billy-can explored cellular shapes in orange, blue and livid red.
Rohr’s delight at the work was matched by the support of experts such as the National Gallery of Victoria’s Judith Ryan, who made the artists of Bidyadanga the stars of her 2004 exhibition, Colour Power. Sell-out group and solo shows became routine. But the mystery of the colour was deepening. Rohr and the artists, who speak only broken, basic English, would talk over the direction of the work and little, confusing details might emerge: perhaps the white pigment on their canvases could be the dazzling gleam of the salt-lake crusts and the greens might be clues to the presence of bush medicine. But the Great Sandy Desert, in the days when the Yulparitja still lived there, was an unusual place: cats were food, dogs were messengers and birds could talk. There was an irreducible distance, psychological as much as geographical, between their world and ours.
“When we learn about colour, we learn the rules,” Rohr muses. “But these artists use discordant colours, which don’t belong together. For them, colours are vibrations. I feel the paintings have more the air of musical compositions, songs, in vibrating, pulsing paint, with themes in colour counterbalanced by other, answering colours. Of course they’re painting country but, as they see it, in musical terms.”
Such are the kinds of ideas that have been circulating about the art of Bidyadanga. But critics and collectors are nervously aware that these painters don’t fit neatly into the standard paradigm. Weaver Jack, Jan Billycan and their friends plainly don’t know what Western Desert art is supposed to look like. They may be old desert dwellers, but they steadfastly refuse to paint anything connected to their law. More than that, they have their own way with colour and pigment. Can the clashing, challenging colour streams of Bidyadanga represent some original, untainted desert way of seeing?
Rohr has been unable to test such ideas in a public gallery exhibition, nor can she form a collection for the north-west – for Bidyadanga community or for Broome – so strong is the market demand for the limited supply of work coming from the best-known senior artists. But she has found herself agonising increasingly over the future of the art current she helped bring into being and over the strange atmospherics that surrounded its birth.
These questions loomed repeatedly during conversations with the artists in Bidyadanga and Broome, and new aspects of this saga came to light. Clues emerged from the way the painting movement first took hold, for underpainting was one of Bidyadanga’s earliest trademarks: networks of aqua and deep prussian blue were regularly traced out, like secret code, before a painting was begun.
Weaver Jack and Donald Moko now describe those blues as the hidden, underground creek systems of their desert home, the lifeblood of the Yulparitja, which can be glimpsed as the shimmering, binding thread within their art. About fifty years ago, those buried creeks and water channels failed, and drought held the desert in its grip. It was about the time that large-scale mining operations began in the Pilbara: according to Donald, the water-snakes that lived in and quickened the waterholes began to vanish and die.
Devastated by this environmental catastrophe, the Yulparitja retreated, abandoning their country, following the line of fast-emptying wells. There was fighting, rivalry, social disruption. Grief descended and shaped the remainder of their lives.
When the artists first painted at Bidyadanga, it was as if they were living those days once more, and their canvases were wet with tears. The colour code in their works hints at that time: dark blue signifies the deep, fresh-water sources that preserved them on their journey out; purple is a troubling colour, and speaks of salty or dried-up wells. There are stretches of country that seem blessed with moisture and full of grace; and other regions where people can sink into quicksands and vanish, or drink poisoned waters and die.
“The blue, that central colour, is their fundamental channel of life,” Rohr says. “When you grow up in a drought, water becomes the most important thing, and the Yulparitja were forced to change their life because of one element. The art comes back to this: their exile, their work of memory. It becomes clear why they paint water more obsessively and intensively than other desert artists.”
They also use their colour as a form of contact with vanished time. As they work, Weaver and Alma, Donald, Jan and the other Bidyadanga artists sing and speak out loud, and summon up the lost members of their family, their ancestors, and the elusive water-snakes. It is the past and that remembered country – full of people, rich in ceremonies – that gleams so brightly in their canvases.
A universe stands behind her, half gone but also half surviving in its odd, retrospective, bright-coloured form. For the joys and the pain of the Yulparitja are what live on in their artworks; they are obituaries of landscape cast in paint.
VI. CRITICAL QUESTIONS
Crossing the Divide
IT HAS BEEN, AS USUAL, A BUSY, sensation-filled season in the world of Aboriginal art, with new desert painting schools emerging and landmark public exhibitions going on view. By any standards, several of the latest openings were worthy of sustained attention in the national media: the first important exhibition of works by landscape artist Angelina George, held in Darwin in 2006, and the series of shows by Yulparitja artists from Bidyadanga, shown in Melbourne in the same year.
But you would search in vain for consistent, enlightening art criticism that surveys such events. The reasons for this absence go right to the heart of the uneasy relationship between Aboriginal artists and their public.
The problems confronting the would-be critic of indigenous art are multiple. How to explore the visual creations of a totally different culture – or, rather, several distinct cultures – whose traditions and belief systems are not merely foreign to mainstream Australians but also veiled in secrecy? How to assess the art from such a world, and present its stylistic grammar and its variations? Who first decides what counts as a successful, resolved piece? And who then makes the case for its power
and appeal across the cultural divide?
As is well known, the Aboriginal art industry (the telling word increasingly used) is worth scores of millions of dollars a year, although most of that money is scooped up by retailers and middle men. But for all the material value placed on the works of prominent traditional artists, for all the collection building and the classifying scholarship, we seem to feel no desire for an engaged response to Aboriginal painting – there is little trace of conversation or exchange between artists and viewing audience, no sense that shared ideas or emotions are being set in play by new artworks. Critical discussion, in its true role as a dialogue that flows between the inquiring public and the creating artist, is simply not found in the domain of indigenous art.
This produces bizarre effects. Important works are admired rather than analysed, weighed in the intellect and assessed. Fresh trends or unfamiliar developments in the repertoire of established painters are scrutinised for their striking novelty and their potential investment value rather than for their depth. The reputations of newly discovered artists are built on vogue and have a tendency to be self-sustaining. These are the hallmarks of a speculative bubble.
What role, in this troubling environment, should criticism play? It surely is to guide the viewer, to argue with and contest new art, even as it appreciates, husbands, supports. Take a handful of examples, from three different indigenous art provinces, where criticism has not fulfilled its clarifying function.
In 2003, an exhibition of bark paintings from north-east Arnhem Land opened at Sydney’s Annandale Galleries. It bore the title Buwayak, or Invisibility. This was the first public display of a new painting style; demanding, yet charged with beauty. It marked an intellectual and cultural development beyond the finely detailed barks produced by the region’s artists during the previous decade. You might have to go back as far as an early twentieth-century Picasso show for an opening as charged with visual innovation. To underscore the point, an elaborate catalogue was prepared. Collectors, not surprisingly, pounced. The episode, however, was largely ignored by critics; it was treated as just another turn in the passing parade. Subsequent exhibitions in succeeding years have confirmed the depth of this new current – yet it remains essentially an unexamined visual challenge.
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