Mission & Justice

Victoria Laurie; 14/6/08

The windmill stands midway along the Canning Stock Route, spinning lazily in the late afternoon breeze. Beneath its blades, marked “Well 33 Kunawarritji”, a group of Martu women are gathering for a photo. Giggling and grumbling, these Western Desert artists lift skirts to step over bull-rushes growing around the foot of the water tank.  Around its side they’ve draped a canvas decorated with yellow, gold, orange and green circles. Sisters Kumpaya Girgirba, Nora Wompi, Bugai Whylouter and Nora Nangubar finished the canvas earlier in the day. Now a young indigenous photographer, Morika Biljabu, is herding them together for a commemorative snapshot. “Look out, snake!” someone shouts and they scatter like startled galahs at a waterhole. It’s a false alarm and everyone settles back into position for Morika to get her shots from the top of a Nissan four-wheel-drive. Remote is too weak a word to describe how far we are from anywhere. Our party of 15 artists and a small crew of non-indigenous helpers has gathered roughly halfway along the Canning Stock Route, the droving trail forged by surveyor Alfred Canning in 1906 to bring cattle down from the Kimberley town of Halls Creek southwest to Wiluna, a daunting 1750 kilometres through sand and salt pans.

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Aunohita Mojumdar; 3/6/08

On a dusty road in a middle class neighbourhood in west Kabul, an unassuming house looks almost as nondescript as any other except for the simple board declaring it is the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Afghanistan. It is here that a quiet revolution is taking place. For the first time in the country’s recent history, a group of young women are learning to express their experiences, sorrows and joys growing up in war-ravaged Afghanistan through art And they are producing remarkably sophisticated and eloquent work. The originality of their imagination is even more extraordinary in the context of Afghanistan’s tragic history of conflict and the violence which continues to be visited upon women living in this country.

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Nicolas Rothwell; 31/5/08

Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty; Hardie Grant Books, 352pp, $120

At Brisbane’s World Expo in 1988, in front of a series of large Western Desert canvases, shown in “an enclosed, rather claustrophobic exhibition space”, the seeds of one of Australia’s great collections of modern indigenous art were sown. Colin and Liz Laverty, who have put together a remarkable collection in the past 20 years. Colin and Liz Laverty, already passionate collectors of contemporary abstract and figurative paintings, were swept away by what they saw that afternoon. They immersed themselves in the new, fast-developing tradition of Aboriginal art: they began their bush travels, which soon took them across remote Australia, to red sand deserts and to the turquoise bays of Arnhem Land. In this continuing quest, as the couple relate, “we have visited community art centres, and even small outstations, where we have found visually beautiful and culturally interesting paintings”. Above all, of course, the Lavertys were collecting, always collecting, with these precise criteria in mind: the beautiful and the culturally interesting.

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Andra Jackson; 8/5/08

Tommy Watson sits quietly and toys with his walking stick to trace an outline on the floor. His niece Jorna says the Alice Springs artist often uses a stick in the same manner to draw an idea in the dirt for what might become an acclaimed painting. While others talk around and about him, the elderly artist from the Northern Territory border’s Irrunytju community, has a faraway look in his eyes.He speaks only Pitjantjatjara and his niece and Agathon Galleries owner John Ioannou.

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Nicolas Rothwell; 29/4/08

Almost a year ago, after long reflection, Tjunkiya Napaltjarri, the most austere and dramatic stylist among the Western Desert’s senior female painters, began to shift her palette. In place of her trademark molten golds and black, deep-scored lines shimmering like scars cut into space, she started experimenting with a set of softer, easier, more complementary shades. In short order she made herself, at the age of 80, into a colourist, a new kind of painter, seeking after new effects. The fruits of this transformation are on view in her new solo exhibition at Sydney’s Utopia Art gallery: the display makes a potent case for her supremacy among the much-collected Pintupi masters of the desert. All through her painting career Napaltjarri has been seen as a difficult artist, a creator of visual confrontations, whose works contain an air of instability and even of implicit threat. They have a taut, urgent energy about them, while the paintings of the better known, more treasured old women from the desert school are gentler in their impact, and seem almost to soothe and lull the heart with their colour harmonies and their sweeps of curve and line.

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Rex Butler; 28/4/08

The picture is irredeemably strange. An Aboriginal family - their bodies rendered in graphite, their clothes colourfully painted - is gathered around a makeshift cot on which a newborn baby sleeps. They are posed awkwardly, slightly unnaturally, as though unconsciously echoing some archetypal scene. It’s a candid snapshot of indigenous life, unflinchingly depicting the tattered clothes, the reduced circumstances, the flimsy humpy made of corrugated iron in which the family undoubtedly lives. But most astonishing of all, in the middle of this scene of everyday life, a white angel arrives, his arm outstretched, his garments fluttering, his wings miraculously holding him aloft. The work is called Intervention by Alice Springs-based artist Rod Moss, who is showing at Brisbane’s Fireworks Gallery.

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Rosemary Sorensen; 17/4/08

Five years ago, the ambitious Story Place exhibition, which surveyed art from Cape York and the northern rainforest region of Queensland, made much of the “unique bicornual baskets” called jawun. Unique to the people who live between Cardwell and Cooktown, the jawun is engineered, as curator Julie Ewington tells us, not just shaped. The wide-mouthed basket is made from split cane with a base that curves into points on either side. Those horns have a practical rather than aesthetic function, as they are used to trap fish and plants. Story Place, which ran at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2003, was an enormous show, and the way it displayed woven baskets was so elegant they became more aesthetic objects than practical. The women of the Jumbun community, northwest of Cardwell, were presented as artists working in a rare and difficult medium.

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