Indigenous Australia
A Visual Insight into the Folklore and History of Aboriginal Australia
Indira lakshmi prasad
The art work on display ranged from traditional Australian Aboriginal tribal works to contemporary paintings, installations and sculptural works from Australian Aboriginal artists working into the present day, both equally striking visually as well as conceptually.
Indigenous Australia is a truly awe inspiring insight into the culture and history of the Australian Indigenous people. As far as the history of its representation in India this is the first of its caliber, and the exhibition hall at the National Gallery of Modern Art was a truly momentous setting. NGMA has partnered with The National Gallery of Australia, to orchestrate this exhibition, which presents significant works produced by Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists from the late 1800s through to today, drawn exclusively from the NGA’s extensive collection.
The art work on display ranged from traditional Australian Aboriginal tribal works to contemporary paintings, installations and sculptural works from Australian Aboriginal artists working into the present day, both equally striking visually as well as conceptually. The unique style of dotted mark making of the Australian Aboriginal Tribal art tells a story of the landscape of Australia to which the Australian Aboriginal people had a strong spiritual and folkloric connection to. The traditional Aboriginal art pieces often represent an aerial view of the landscape, the density and colours of the dotted marks representing the topography of the land; mountains, deserts, rivers and forests. Within these masterful works often contain traditional folkloric tales and depictions of the Aboriginal Gods such as the Rainbow Serpent; a common deity seen as the Creator God, the life giver and destroyer, as he glides across the natural landscape. Each clan and tribe have their own style of dot painting, and use the different styles almost as a signature, so by looking a the art work a lot can be understood about the different landscapes and folklores of different parts of Australia.
A fascinating portion of the exhibition are the works created by members of the Papunya community who originate from Central Australia. The people from this community were gathered by the government and placed into a reservation, where people unknown to each other were forced to live together and became downtrodden. In 1971 an art teacher came to the community and was encouraging the children to use traditional designs to tell their individual stories. However the children were unable to do so as they hadn’t been through the initiation ceremony required to start making traditional art. So the art teacher started talking to the Aboriginal men working at the school, who were working as gardeners and maintenance people, encouraging them to create traditional designs on the walls of the school, telling their own stories. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and his brother Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri were two of these men, and their work is a significant part of the exhibition. They were encouraged to paint in 1971 and continued their journey. Initially they began painting on pieces of discarded wood, sometimes using the traditional earthen colour of Ochre, and sometimes house paint or whatever was available. The two brothers created numerous works based on the natural landscape such as ‘Bushfire Dreaming’ (1&2) where they have used the traditional dotting technique to depict the aerial landscape. Different formations of delicate white dots represent the mist and smoke of the bushfires above the land, and also the rhythm and movement of the wind as the haze drifts across the land. The rhythmic forms in these landscape paintings also reflect upon how the ancestors in Aboriginal folklore are said to have moved across the land, existing within the natural landscape, and forever moving across it.
