like knowing an emotion

‘like knowing an emotion’i

Garnkiny to Ganyu was an outcome of an Australia Council for the Arts curatorial fellowship which enabled an emerging curator to work for a year in a public art gallery. Clare Armitage moved from Canberra to Katherine in the NT to undertake the fellowship at the Godinmayin Yijard Rivers Arts & Culture Centre (GYRACC), mentored by the Centre’s director Cath Bowdler.

The fellowship was a one-off initiative which recognised the need for more professional pathways for emerging curators, the sort of initiative that seems a pipedream now amidst the current federal art funding fiasco. For Armitage it was an opportunity to return to the NT (having previously lived in Darwin) and to work in a relatively new gallery (opened in 2012) under a mentor with extensive curatorial and NT visual arts experience.

Garnkiny to Ganyu, Artists who capture the night was Armitage’s curatorial debut. Suitably ‘top end’ in theme and selection, the exhibition was a uniquely sophisticated aesthetic and poetic statement through the work of nineteen artists, a mix of mostly well-established, living practitioners from around the country but with an emphasis on Indigenous and northern/Central Australian perspectives.

The exhibition was a perfect platform for local Katherine regional artist Bill Yidumduma Harney whose night sky paintings and related astronomy form a significant dimension of his practice, as shown through his 2003 publication Dark Sparklers (co-authored with Hugh Cairns) and no doubt through his forthcoming (2016) retrospective at GYRACC, guest-curated by Margie West. As with many of the artists in this exhibition, Harney was represented by a single work (painting), an indication of Armitage’s accent on the diverse and individual as well as the Centre’s limited exhibiting space (meant to be addressed in the next stage of GYRACC’s construction). Harney was also part of the public programs leading a tour of the night-time sky through stories from his Wardaman cosmology.

Even more iconically night-sky affiliated perhaps are the works of Warmun (WA)-based artist Mabel Juli and the late Gulumbu Yunupingu from Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land, both included in the exhibition and commemorated in its title through Mabel’s Gankiny (Moon) to Gulumbu’s Ganyu (Stars), a symbolic ‘West to East’ passage, as Armitage describes in her catalogue essay, evoking the exhibition’s geographic and cross-cultural trajectory.

Both moon and star are so luminously, lyrically present in Mabel’s work, represented in the exhibition by an ochre painting and print. Gulumbu was represented by a single striking linocut print of a ganyu-studded sky in reds and pinks. Its relative modesty in view of the repertoire of her ganyu-related works, including monumental bark paintings and sculptures, was refreshing. It signalled a kind of confidence and pragmatism about Armitage’s curatorial strategy – that strong, representative work can occur in any size and medium; of the innate strength of modesty and quietness. Other prints were included by Nyapanyapa Yunupingu (Yirrkala), Sade Carrington (Warmun), Arone Meeks (Cairns), Brian Robinson  (Cairns), Conrad Tipungwuti (Tiwi Islands), Billy Black (Ramingining), Fiona Hall (Adelaide), and the late Billy Missi (Cairns). The black-and-whiteness of many of them suited a stark night sky aesthetic. Revisiting Missi’s sizeable Kulba Yadai (Old Lyrics)(2006) linocut print again was like seeing an old friend, as was the encounter with the linocut print by Meeks, an artist of longstanding distinction whose work is not often seen in the NT.  Meeks does not however belong to a Torres Strait Islander wave of linocut artists, as suggested by Armitage’s essay, having emerged instead with the rise of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in Sydney in the late 1980s, and expressing a particular connection through his art to Kuku Midigi country around Laura, his birthplace, in Far North Queensland.

The exhibition hit many big, high-key notes as well. It included two Darwin photographers: Fiona Morrison with two large and masterful prints from her recent Yéqŭseries of street-night images taken in Huantie, a former industrial suburb of Beijing; and two time-lapse prints by Louise Law, one of the exhibition’s newly discovered artists. Also new, to this reviewer at least, was the work of Melbourne-based photographer Kate Robertson, represented by four large atmospheric prints which dominated one of the gallery’s key walls. The exhibition’s mix of known and lesser known artists also seemed to confirm Armitage’s curatorial confidence while adding to the exhibition’s overall sense of discovery and wonderment.

Details:

Garnkiny to Ganyu, Artists who capture the night, Godinmayin Yijard Rivers Arts & Culture Centre, 1 May to 13 June 2015.

Artist:

Fiona Hall, Billy Missi, Gulumbu Yunupingu, Mabel Juli, Sylvia Kanytjupai Ken,  Kate Robertson, Louise Law, Fiona Morrison, Arone Meeks, Brian Robinson, Conrad Tipungwuti, Billy Black, Bill Yidumduma Harney, Alma Nungurrayi Granites, Athena Nangala Granites, Alicka Napanangka Brown, Mabel Juli, Sade Carrington,  and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu.

Bio: Maurice O’Riordan is Director, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art.

iFrom Arone Meeks’s artist statement in the exhibition catalogue for Art & Aboriginality, 1987, Portsmouth Festival UK, 9 May to 14 June 1987.