This may well be my last outing before the Nativity, so it makes sense to furnish you with some offerings that are perhaps a match for the traditional gold, frankincense and myrrh.
It’s not often that you see an exhibition which contains work that just lifts the spirits. But, at the Annandale Galleries in Sydney until 13th December, proof that an art community like that of the Yolŋu at the Buku Larrnggay Art Centre in Yirrkala just cannot stand still. ‘Yolŋu Power’ at the Art Gallery of NSW may have gone far too soon, but people are still talking about it. Amazingly, Annandale is showing two artists who didn’t even make it into that show. Though their surname is mightily familiar – Marawili. For while their cousin/brother Djambawa has been leading and innovating since the 1990s, brothers Wulu and Bambarrarr seem to have had to wait until their father died in 2018 before they too could flower.
And Bambarrarr works in the Djambawa tradition of manipulating the sacred minyt’ji to tell ancient stories on bark. Wulu, on the other hand, has clearly been more influenced by that other innovative Annandale alumnus, Guynbi Ganambarr. This master house-builder who took those skills into the ‘found’ movement where Yolŋu artists no longer had to pursue barks (and kill trees) but could ‘find’ rubber mining belts, nice rectangular dance boards or an amazing number of fallen road signs, and etch their stories into the surfaces with power tools.
Put together fifteen of those road signs and etch away, and you could win the Big Telstra, as Gaypalani Wanambi did this year! But by creating organic figuration in a stark black and silver on his panels, as Wulu Marawili has done in a gleaming suite of eight ex-road signs, no one will even think of turning them round to admire the coloured warnings on the obverse. As Will Stubbs, Buku’s Coordinator puts it in the catalogue, Wulu is “depicting the fertile oasis of jungle inside the coastal mangroves known as Garrangali”. And to add resonance, this is “the place where crocodiles make their nests, and also the repository of Madarrpa souls”.
From work that has the character of black and white prints, to spectacular Fauvist painting in Melbourne that, arguably is the first major step forward in the Namatjira School of watercolour. Charles Jangala Inkamala at the Vivien Anderson Gallery from 19th November is self-taught and works with Bindi Mwerre Anthurre Artists, which specialises in promoting neuro-divergent art-makers, rather than coming straight out of Hermansburg. His subject-matter may be pure Namatjira – Mt Sonder, Glen Helen Gorge, Simpsons Gap, etc – but he sees it in wild colours and original shapes that reflect his sense of the emotional resonance and energy of the Central Desert landscape. Perhaps it helps that, while his father was a member of the great Inkamala clan, his mother came from Papunya.
A final stocking present for you is a book, ‘Windows and Mirrors’, being the collected essays of that pioneering First Nations curator, Djon Mundine. Plenty of reasons to dip into his various histories going back to the Aboriginal Memorial that he assembled in the mid-1980s at Ramingining where he was that remarkable rarity, an Aboriginal art adviser, and coming right up to date with Archie Moore’s Golden Lion-winning Venice Biennale artwork, ‘kith and kin’. In the middle, ‘An Aboriginal Soliloquy’ responds to another major Mundine exhibition, ‘They Are Meditating’ where he brought ancient, timeless Arnhem barks into the Museum of Contemporary art; ‘Bungaree’s Circumcision of Australia’ was the tasteless title for an essay hailing the Bung’s contribution to the future Mosman; and Mundine even contributes a brief poem, “I saw a hairy man today under the sacred fig tree – I think I saw me’!
Actually, that small, hairy man looks best photographed in Venice, boldly challenging La Serenissima with the sheer length of his dreadlocks. As Rover Thomas famously said of that city, “Whole place falling down”.
‘Windows and Mirrors’ is published Art Ink atg $70.
