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Video Exhibition celebrates Indigenous art

Mike Sexton

The Art Gallery of SA is showcasing work by Indigenous artists.


IAN HENSCHKE, PRESENTER: The art gallery has just unveiled its most ambitious project this year, an exhibition charting the evolution out of the desert art movement which began with water colours of Albert Namatjira and has now grown into a multimillion dollar industry.

And a warning to Aboriginal viewers that this report contains image of people now deceased.

MIKE SEXTON, REPORTER: When Albert Namatjira picked up a paint brush in 1934 he started a revolution in Australian art.

So vivid and brilliant were his water colours that soon everyone wanted one, including the Queen and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

NICK MITSEVICH, ART GALLERY OF SA, DIRECTOR: The gallery always has been a very innovative gallery and since the early 1930s, 1939, the first acquisition of an Indigenous work was made by this gallery nationally so we feel very proud of that history.

MIKE SEXTON: That water colour was the first of an Indigenous collection that grew over the years, as curators took what some considered risks by acquiring works of then unknown artists like Clifford Possum, Turkey Tolson and Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

In the years since, those names and others have become familiar in galleries from Paris to New York and changed the way international art critics viewed this country.

NICK MITSEVICH: Australia's truly newly unique art movement is the work of our first peoples. Indigenous art is the most potent and the most unique form of art that we have internationally.

MIKE SEXTON: But curator of Indigenous art at the Art Gallery of South Australia Nici Cumpston says European eyes have often stopped short, including Albert Namatjira.

NICI CUMPTON, ART GALLERY OF SA, CURATOR: He was working in a Western style, because he'd worked alongside of Rex Battarbee but he was painting ancestral country, so we look at these beautiful landscapes that he created and we see this beautiful country, but in actual fact those stories are very involved, very in depth stories that have been passed down to him about that particular site.

MIKE SEXTON: Recently Albert Namatjira's grandson was in Adelaide.

He was one of 30 artists and family members from remote communities in the desert country of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory invited to the opening of an exhibition charting their work.

FAMILY MEMBER: That's my aunty, she passed away.

MIKE SEXTON: The walls of the city gallery were transformed with images of the desert from Doreen Reid Nakamarra's Rock Holes at Marrapinti to Hilda Moodoo's depiction of the nuclear tests on her family's countries at the Maralinga Tjarutja lands.

NICK MITSEVICH: Thank you very much, for all the people that have travelled many distances to be with us today.

This is the biggest exhibition that the gallery's staging this year.

MIKE SEXTON: Making her way through the crowd was Nici Cumpston, whose grandmother was a Barkindji woman from the Darling River in NSW.

She spent the best part of three years curating this exhibition, including going bush to gather the stories that went with the paintings.

NICI CUMPSTON: Sitting in the back of the troopie with all the children, the dog and the ladies really gave me an insight into their life and they were telling me about different particularly important places along the way.

MIKE SEXTON: Two of the women she met are Lena Nyadbi and Mabel Juli from Turkey Creeek in the Kimberley region of WA.

The pioneer artists from this part of the country were Queenie McKenzie and Rover Thomas who in the 1970s moved from painting bodies for ceremony to using boards and canvasses, but they continued using only ochres found in their country.

NICI CUMPSTON: The woman community use ochres, natural ochres crushed up and mixed with a synthetic polymer glue and that's how they apply they're paint to the canvas so it's all made up and just to see how hard it is to actually dig for the ochre, that was a unique opportunity for me.

LENA NYADBI, ARTIST: Made me boil that thing and stir them up and get the brush and do the painting.

MIKE SEXTON: Lena Nyadbi and Mabel Juli were taught how to gather ochre and paint by Queenie McKenzie and Rover Thomas as a way of both telling stories and earning money.

MABEL JULI, ARTIST: I used to watch Aunty Queenie while she was painting and you told me that you can try it to painting. You might get something money, someone pay you... old Queenie.

MIKE SEXTON: Mabel Juli's work in this exhibition is entitled 'Moon Dreaming' and the explanation of it is a long entertaining story, the climax of which still gives her friend the giggles in the retelling.

NICI CUMPSTON: It's current, it's alive. These people are ever evolving and telling stories, contemporary stories that stem from an ancestral connection.

MIKE SEXTON: To cement the connection between the pictures and the stories they tell, the artists or relatives have been recorded, explaining the meaning of the works.

When the exhibition tours the rest of the country these recordings will be played in galleries to enhance understanding.

NICK MITSEVICH: It isn't just about art. It's about people, geography, culture, history and art that's happening today.

So I believe it will have strong resonance with an audience.

7.30 South Australia