McCulloch & McCulloch News
We are currently exhibiting a Private View exhibition on the Mornington Peninsula, Pattern & Palette: texture, colour and design in Indigenous art.
Our upcoming winter exhibition with partner gallery Salt Contemporary, Queenscliff is an extensive exhibition of 2 and 3 dimensional works, Salt of the Earth, an exhibition of pure Kimberley ochres; barks and carvings from Yirrkala, Milingimbi and Maningrida; Tiwi ochre carvings and paintings.
In conversation and opening: Sunday May 27, 2.30 pm.
Curators floor talk: Sunday June 10, 3 pm.
Salt Contemporary Address: 33 -35 Hesse St Queenscliff Victoria 3225
Tel: +(03) 5258 3988 Email: info@salt-art.com.au www.saltcontemporaryart.com
Opening hours Friday to Monday 11am -5pm Tuesday and Wednesday by appointment.
Please enquire about both of these at info@mccullochandmcculloch.com.au
We are saddened by the passing of one of Arnhem Land’s greatest artists, Gulumbu Yunupingu. Susan wrote on her back in 2004, after she’d won the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award, for Australian Art Collector.
GULUMBU YUNUPINGU: WE ALL LOOK AT THE SAME STARS
Gulumbu Yunupingu: We all look at the same stars – Australian Art Collector
Issue 30, October – December 2004
For Gulumbu Yunupingu the stars lead us upwards through life towards the heavens. Her richly painted ceremonial poles depict this universal journey, writes Susan McCulloch.
When she looks at the stars, she sees those visible to the eye, and those not – the multitude, which are out of human sight and lead ever onwards to infinity. This expansive view of the universe is the underpinning inspiration for the richly-painted poles which won for Arnheim Land artist Gulumbu Yunupingu this year’s top Aboriginal art award – the $40 000 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award.
The installation of three ceremonial poles ranging in height from about 1.7 metres to more than two metres is called Garak, The Universe. Layers of heavy white ochres are mixed only with a little glue to help the paint adhere to the stringy bark hollowed tree trunks which Yunupingu (with the help of her grandsons) cut herself. Shining through the heavily impastoed white ochre are detailed abstracted star shapes in variations of brown and yellow ochres. With their simple, graceful form and shimmering paintwork they have both a sense of mystery and ageless quality.
Surrounded by spotlights and cameras at the announcement of her win at Darwin’s Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) the 59-year-old Gumatj-Rrakpala clan woman gestures expressively towards the heavens as she describes the inspiration for her work. So engaging is her power of storytelling that it is as though we listeners too are taken from day to night, to the heavens and luminous night sky she describes.
“Every night since I was born I have been looking at the stars,” says Yunupingu. “There they are – so many – leading us from earth to the heavens. They move us upward through life and eventually through death.”
It is an affirmation of her belief that death is not the end of existence but only a phase in a broader evolution.
Also, says Yunupingu, the stars are a reminder that all people can be unified. “We all must work together – and the stars show us that we are all the same underneath. We can all look at these stars whichever sky we are looking at.”
It’s a sentiment reminiscent of those of many of the Western poets and painters who have been similarly fascinated with the power of the night sky.
Yunupingu’s paintings however incorporate an added dimension, based on belief of the creation of stories on which the images for these poles are based.
Born in 1945 in an island off the coast of Arnhem Land, near Nhulunbuy (Gove), Yunupingu is one of the large clan of Yunupingus whose members are both highly respected clan leaders and instrumental spokespeople and cultural leaders in modern day Aboriginal development. She is the older sister of cultural leader Galarrwuy and Mandawuy Yunupingu of Yothu Yindi fame. Her profile in the Western world may not be as high as that of her famous brothers, but Gulumbu’s achievements and talents are equally as impressive.
She is a senior healing medicine woman whose male relatives defer to her knowledge and she spends much time caring for everyone from women in childbirth, ill children, those with serious disease and the elderly. “Whenever there is someone to be looked after she will be there,” says her son in law Will Stubbs, co-ordinator of Yirrkala’s Buku Larrnggay Mulka Centre. “My manager” Gulumbu describes Stubbs. The two cannot say each other’s names as due to family relationships this is precluded under Yolgnu (Arnhem Land Aboriginal people’s law.)
Growing up in the then mission settlement of Yirrkala, on the coast of eastern Arnhem Land in the 1950s, Yunupingu learnt Christianity. This she incorporates not as a separate religion but as part of a pantheistic belief system of the universe as it relates to Yolgnu. One of her major achievements has been translating the Bible from English to Gumatj.
Published recently the Gumatj bible took 26 years to produce and is
an achievement of which she is proud but modest.
“Well it’s just something that someone needed to do,” she responds lightly when asked about the vast nature of the task.
It is an enthusiasm, joie de vivre and persistence which embodies her whole attitude to life and with which she approaches all activities – from daily hunting with her favourite digging sticks (one metal with which to hook out mud crabs; and one wooden to dig out edible plant roots) to the making of string which she then weaves into dilly bags, to the cutting and painting of tree trunks to paint.
“When I decided to do these I got up at six every morning and worked and worked for about two weeks until they were done,” she says of her award-winning poles. “I didn’t let the children come in and put their hands on them; these are clean, clean ones and I wanted them to look all white and really beautiful.”
Judges of this year’s Award were Art Gallery of New South Wales director Edmund Capon and the National Gallery of Victoria’s indigenous art curator Julie Gough.
“These hollow poles literally glisten with innumerable constellations, which colourfully evoke the enormity and magic of an endless universe,” they said. “They eloquently express Gulumbu’s sense of connection with local place, tradition and the stories as told to her [evoking] the wonders of the shared night sky and the universality of all peoples under that great canopy.”
Yunupingu collected the ochre for their making from Darwin’s Eastern Point while on a visit there from Yirrkala about 800 kilometres north east of Darwin last year. “There was some good yellow and browns there that I really liked,” she said. “So it is as though these are coming home.” (As winner of the Award, her work will join those of previous winners in the collection of Darwin’s MAGNT.)
Yunupingu is the third Yirrkala artist to win this prestigious award. In 1997 bark painter Yanggariny Wunungmurra, won with a detailed bark painting Gangan comprising densely textured quality of cross hatching, and formal clan design typical of Yirrkala works. In 2002 clan leader, painter and Uniting Church minister Gawirrin Gumana won with a beautifully incised and painted memorial pole.
Yunupingu is however the first woman from Yirrkala to have won the award. Traditionally the prerogative of male clan leaders, over the last 20 years painting has been taught to their female relations by men such as Mawalan Marika, one of whose daughters Banduk, has become a famous painter and leading spokesperson for indigenous rights.
Yunupingu, says art co-ordinator Will Stubbs, has been painting forever
but only in a larger more professional context for the last several years. She exhibited a bark painting in last year’s Aboriginal Art Award and her work was selected for showing in the World Expo in Hanover in 2000. It is in several collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Kerry Stokes collection and she is holding her first solo exhibition of bark paintings and carvings at Melbourne’s Alcaston Gallery in November 2004.
More recently she has learnt printmaking, her textured designs well suited to the lined blocking of the process of screen-printing. Her prints along with those of other Yirrkala artists were shown in an imaginative hanging – from the branches of white ochre-painted palms in Darwin’s Botanic Gardens – at the same time as this year’s Award.
The poles she paints are not those used as hollow log coffins in Yolgnu burial ceremonies, although the logs – naturally hollowed-out by termites – are similar in look to those used for this purpose. But these are memorial poles made for ceremonial and educative purposes. Her father Munggurrawuy Yunupingu who taught her their making, made some as a statement of Yolgnu culture during the 1960s when the Yolgnu were making representations to the Australian Government for control over their lands with the encroaching of mining in their area.
In the 1970s Yunupingu with her sister, husband and children were instrumental in establishing the outstation of Biranybirany – where she now lives some of the time, continuing to teach English, maths, writing and Gumatj.
A strong worker towards the unification and education of people about each other’s culture, Yunupingu, with her brother Galarrwuy was a founder of the area’s annual Garma Festival of arts and culture.
The stories for her Award-winning poles come from two creation stories told to Yunupingu by her father. One relates the tale of two sisters, once living on earth, who turned into stars that sit under the Milky Way. During the dry season the sisters argue and sit apart from each other with different fires. When the season is cooler they are seen sitting closer together. Their fires near each appear as brighter stars.
The second story is about seven sisters who on earth went hunting in canoes, bringing back a great variety of food such as turtles, water snakes, yams and berries. They too can be seen in the sky as seven stars that come out together.
“We are always connected to those sisters – most nights I would look up to find them,” says Yunupingu.
The painterly heritage of Kunmanara Palpatja – a tribute
The most senior male artist at Tjala Arts, Amata, South Australia, passed away recently. Tjala Arts asked us to contribute a short essay on this important artist to be read at his funeral.
Our respects go to this great artist, his family, friends and art centre.
A respected carver of punu for many decades, since Kunmanara began painting in 2004 at the age of around 83 his distinctive canvases have been hailed as amongst the greats of contemporary Australian painting. Notable for luscious colour and looseness of design, characteristically Kunmanara’s works feature soft pinks, reds and yellows that contrast with deeper colours such as rich midnight blues and black. White was used often as highlighting colour, working with the base colour to create dotted stipples that play across the canvas, while hints of deep red, greens, magenta and blues provide depth and outline.
Kunmanara’s main painting theme was that of the ancient Wanampi story of the mythical water or rainbow snake that formed the country of his birthplace near the Piltati rockhole. Sometimes he also told a simpler story (especially in earlier paintings) – that of bush food. Perhaps in these Mai Tjuta (Plenty Food) works he was recalling a time of plenty, before the devastation to the Australian environment by farming, mining, and introduced species such as feral cats and camels that have impacted so greatly on the native wildlife and flora.
In their bold painterly quality and seemingly free design Kunmanara’s paintings may appear as figurative abstracts. And so, at one level and in the western context, they are. Yet inherent in each work, underlying the layers of glowing colour and curvilinear shapes, are the ancient stories, recorded in these works as they had been by Kunmanara’s ancestors for tens of thousands of years in designs incised on rock faces and sacred men’s objects. It is this extraordinary melding of ancient knowledge and contemporary medium, handled with such a joyous confidence, that gives Kunmanara’s paintings both a strong visual aesthetic and a powerful cultural integrity.
These glorious late artistic outpourings of a long, productive and creative life have become woven into the cultural fabric of this country. They will ensure that Kunmanara’s heritage will live on to inform and inspire future generations.
Susan McCulloch and Emily McCulloch Childs
May 2012
Homepage Story
Out and About: Kanpi Car Show: ‘En plein air and off the track’
* by: BRIDGET CORMACK
* From: The Australian
* March 07, 2012 8:57AM
Minyma Malilu (2012), by Kani Patricia Tunkin, from the The Kanpi Car Show exhibition. Source: Supplied
ARTISTS in a remote Pitjantjatjara community have picked up their brushes to raise money for a sturdy four-wheel-drive to make trips to “special places” in the country.
“These places have stories and those stories are who we are, they belong to us and we belong to them. Without that, we don’t exist,” artist Kani Patricia Tunkin says.
The sites lie outside the community of Kanpi in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands in South Australia’s far northwest and are accessible only by car. Tunkin is one of nine Kanpi artists who have painted works for The Kanpi Car Show, an exhibition put together by McCulloch & McCulloch, showing at Salt Contemporary Art in Queenscliff, Victoria, until March 25.
Tunkin’s grandfather was the great artist Jimmy Baker and she continues to paint his story, Kalaya Tjukurpa (Emu Dreaming). “My grandfather taught me how to paint … He would tell me stories about country. Big stories,” Tunkin says. Her painting Minyma Malilu, pictured, is part of the exhibition and is about one of the women’s stories.
The Kanpi Car Show, Salt Contemporary Art, Queenscliff, Victoria, until March 25.
THE KANPI CAR SHOW[
McCulloch & McCulloch @ Salt Contemporary, March 5–25, 2012
Results of the Kanpi Car show have been most gratifying with the Kanpi artists reporting the purchase of the desired 4WD for back to country trips and ceremonial purposes. The artists – Marita Baker, Kay Baker, Ruth Fatt, David Miller, Teresa Baker, Milpati Baker, Maureen Baker, Kani Patricia Tunkin and Anton Baker all work with the arts centre Tjungu Palya, based at Nyapari, 15 k from their tiny community.
Happy New Year to all – especially our wonderful colleagues, co-workers, clients, friends and supporters. We have another wonderful range of exhibitions, publications and many other exciting projects for 2012 which we look forward to revealing as they come to fruition.
Australia’s new online art site The Stockrooms
has launched with the release of the first ever Brett Whiteley photographic limited editions licensed by Wendy Whiteley from the Whiteley estate. Created by Brett Lichtenstein, the three prints are limited to 250 copies each. Susan, who is on the advisory board of The Stockrooms has curated its first Indigenous art exhibition, Bush Spring.
Brain child of photographer and web designer Michel Lawrence and web business developer Peter Lamont, the new site has strong artist and gallery support and features artists, curators and other interviews in YouTube video clips that background the work on sale from the stockrooms of a wide range of leading Australian artists and galleries. Click here for The Stockrooms.
Our Impressionist calendar for 2012 has sold out and our other diaries and calendars are running very low on stock. Order now to avoid disappointment! Wholesale orders welcome.
We’re enjoying preparing for our upcoming Christmas drinks, art + gifts show that will feature a fantastic array of Indigenous paintings, sculptures, homewares, and objets d'art for imaginative Christmas gifts. Please contact us at info@mccullochandmcculloch.com.au for information.
Susan is a keynote speaker at Melbourne’s Lyceum Club, Saturday 19th November for a day long symposium on Indigenous art.
Emily is participating in a panel hosted by Museums Australia Victoria on ‘Artists in Museums':
Working with artists is a proven method to add diversity to programming and the visitor experience of your cultural organisation. This forum will showcase artists working with museums and will discuss the pros and cons of implementing creative projects. Hear panel discussion regarding the process of commissioning artists for museum exhibitions, public programs and collections.
Speakers Include:
Patrick Watt, Manager Education and Public Programs, National Sports Museum
Penelope Bartlau, Artistic Director, Barking Spider Visual Theatre
Ponch Hawkes, Photographic Artist
Emily McCulloch Childs, Author and Curator and State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowships Recipient
A tour of site specific sculpture at the MCG conducted by Patrick Watt will be a highlight of the afternoon. Refreshments included.
Tuesday 22nd November 2011 at 2:00 pm- 5:00 pm
National Sports Museum
Melbourne Cricket Ground, East Melbourne VIC.
