Latest news with #AboriginalArt
ABC News
a day ago
- Health
- ABC News
Renowned First Nations artist Maree Clarke says designing Australia's biggest 3D tapestry is a 'huge honour'
Maree Clarke is on a clear mission: to preserve South-East Australian Aboriginal culture using the power of art. The latest, groundbreaking example of this is Welcome to Country — Now You See Me: Seeing the Invisible. It's a colossal 10-metre wide, 4.2-metre high tapestry work — Australia's largest 3D tapestry and the result of more than 10,000 hours' work. The renowned Yorta Yorta, Wamba Wamba, Mutti Mutti and Boonwurrung artist and curator says Welcome to Country is a revival of practices that showcase "our stories and design sensibilities" and "speak to the present while honouring the past". "Aboriginal cultural practices were never lost — they simply waited to be woken," she tells ABC Arts. Clarke has played a pivotal role in creating Welcome to Country, using both traditional weaving practices and contemporary tools and techniques. The completion of the project, which took 14 months to make, is one of the most rewarding moments of her career. "Seeing our stories take form in this monumental way is a huge honour," Clarke says. This landmark work is a collaborative effort, designed by Clarke alongside her great nephew and mentee, Boonwurrung/Barkindji man Mitch Mahoney. "[He's] a thoughtful young father, a brilliant artist, and someone deeply connected to culture," she says. Their shared vision was realised through the expertise of 12 skilled weavers from the Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW), a 50-year-old cultural institution dedicated to contemporary textile arts and tapestry weaving. Work was led by master weaver Chris Cochius and senior weaver Amy Cornall. The work's design references the delicate imagery of microscopic river reeds, and is inspired by the traditional river reed necklaces once bestowed upon travellers crossing Country; the necklaces carry meaningful symbols of safe passage and friendship. Welcome to Country is honouring and continuing a longstanding tradition of cultural hospitality and care; deep values of connection, protection and community can all be read into this tapestry. Clarke and Mahoney never envisioned themselves creating a tapestry, but after an initial meeting with the ATW and witnessing their sample weaves, they were "blown away by their accuracy", Clarke says. The experience inspired them to pursue a project they had never thought possible, and "to dream as big as you can dream". In April 2024, when Clarke first approached the ATW, the prospect of translating a complex cultural motif into a woven masterpiece seemed daunting. Extensive conversations and workshopping followed and, a year later, the challenging project transformed into what Cornall describes as "joyful work". "It involves continuous decision-making about shapes and colours, constantly referring back to the original image to ensure everything stays consistent," she explains. Aligning and arranging vertical threads in line with the original drawing requires relentless adjustment. "We spend pretty much all day going back and forth, physically working through the details," Cornall says. Progressing at a steady pace of approximately 10 centimetres per week, the weaving team engaged in a disciplined daily routine, demonstrating unwavering commitment to every stitch and detail. Cornall points out the physicality of the process, highlighting the human touch at every stage — from selecting and custom-dyeing some of the 368 yarns, each carefully carried from the ATW store, to the intricate stitching and weaving. This intense physical effort leaves little room for error, ensuring the artistry remains authentic and imbued with human intention. "Every day is like making a thousand decisions," Cornall says. The end result is a vibrant tapestry of human labour, where every choice — colours, textures, and techniques — contributes to a work that is as much about cultural storytelling as it is about craft. Clarke's design carries profound symbolic weight, especially within the context of its placement in the new Footscray Hospital in Melbourne's inner west. In a hospital, often the place of beginnings and farewells, the work becomes a gift, offering a visual and symbolic gesture of "safe passage to those arriving and those departing", Clarke says. Clarke wanted to infuse the hospital space with cultural warmth and welcome. "We wanted everyone walking into the hospital to feel a sense of being welcomed to Country." Under the microscope, the delicate reeds that inspired the motif reveal entire landscapes — rivers, waterways, hills, and skies — symbolising life and its many journeys. Furthermore, she says, "Embedding Indigenous stories in everyday environments — like hospitals — helps normalise and celebrate our presence, knowledge and history in the places we all share."
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art – a grand, disturbing and provocative exhibition
The opening exhibition at the University of Melbourne's newly refurbished Potter Museum of Art has been given a darkly ironic and deliberately provocative title: 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art. While there is a vast and storied tradition of Aboriginal art, its power and dignity have been criminally under appreciated and devalued until only recently. For most of the 20th century 'this work was considered primitive', says the renowned academic and co-curator of the exhibition, Marcia Langton. The central point of 65,000 Years is declamatory, a forceful demonstration that 'this is not an ethnographic collection', she says. 'It's art.' Given the international standing of Aboriginal art now, where works are hung in major galleries around the world and fetch prices in the millions, it seems bewildering that it was so debased for so long. In the book that accompanies the exhibition, Langton mentions several ethnographers who 'recognised the aesthetic as well as the social and religious implications of the art they encountered', including Karel Kupka and Ronald and Catherine Berndt. But they were exceptions: most collectors thought of the work as naive or 'folk art', and galleries and museums – where they displayed it at all – relegated it to backrooms and basements. Langton and her fellow curators Judith Ryan and Shanysa McConville have organised 65,000 Years around several hero pieces or masterworks. Some are by renowned artists like William Barak, Albert Namatjira and Emily Kam Kngwarray, but many are by unnamed artists whose work was poorly catalogued at the time of acquisition. The opening void that connects the ground floor to the top contains woven works by unknown female artists, alongside three narrbong (or bush bags) by Wiradjuri artist Lorraine Connelly-Northey and a magnificent possum skin cloak by Mandy Nicholson. Langton 'wanted women to be at the heart of the building, because women sustain life'. The exhibition as a whole eschews prettiness and reassurance for something more honest and battle-worn; it grapples with the brutality and theft that underpins Australian colonial history with unflinching candour. Gordon Bennett's Death of the ahistorical subject (up rode the troopers, a, b, c) takes details of a lithograph depicting a massacre of Kamilaroi mob at Slaughterhouse Creek and turns it into a dot-point cry of resistance and reclamation. Christopher Pease's 4 Bedrooms, 2 Bathrooms depicts an Edenic vision of pre-colonial life – superimposed with the floor plan of a new apartment, making the theft of land overt and contemporary. Opening with a collection of works that deal powerfully but respectfully with the atrocities committed in lutruwita (Tasmania), the exhibition moves north through Australia as the viewer ascends the floors. There are rooms of bark paintings from north-eastern Arnhem Land and from Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria. These 'tell the pre-British invasion story of the Dutch coming on their ships', Langton explains, 'as well as the Macassar praus [traditional Indonesian canoes] that were coming here for centuries before the British arrived'. Many of the works in 65,000 Years represent complex and ongoing attempts to reconcile a history of colonial barbarity and murder with an indomitable Indigenous spirit of survival and custodianship. But perhaps the key space, at least as far as the University of Melbourne itself is concerned, is the room labelled the 'dark heart'. In it, contemporary Aboriginal artists interrogate the pseudoscientific and deeply racist history of eugenics, for which the university was an international centre. 'The point is to be offended,' Langton says of this room, which recreates the feeling of an early 20th century lab and includes an imposing portrait of Richard JA Berry, the university's third professor of anatomy and one of the world's leading eugenicists. The skull depicted on his desk may be a memento mori, but it also speaks of the horrors of a colonialist pedagogy, where the remains of Aboriginal people were looted, studied and boxed up for decades, all under the rubric of academia. 'A lot of government policies and white supremacist doctrine emanate from this pseudoscience,' Ryan says; she suggests a line can be drawn from Berry's bogus study to the White Australia policy, the Stolen Generations and Black deaths in custody. McConville agrees, labelling this room 'a call to arms'. If the room is disturbing – more for its clinical, patrician atmosphere and scientific pretensions than any visceral horror it depicts – so is the history it interrogates. But while this 'dark heart' of bones and instruments feels necessary, it isn't indicative of the exhibition as a whole. It lacks the vibrancy of colour, the audacity and resilience, and the sheer joy of the artworks on display elsewhere. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion As the viewer reaches the top floors, past major works by Ginger Riley Munduwalawala and Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, they reach a zenith of sorts; a space of astronomy, of stars and the night sky. Dominating one room are the Tjanpi Desert Weavers' lifesize sculptural figures of the Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters), who leapt into the skies to escape a lecherous old man called Nyiru and transformed into the Pleiades. They tell a tale of pursuit and escape, of transformation and metamorphosis, that feels reminiscent of Ovid and Greek myth. There is an expansiveness in these works that is often astonishing; they seem thoroughly uninterested in interiority or psychology in a western sense, championing the omniscient and universal over the solipsistic. Murrinhpatha artist Nym Bandak's All the world is a case in point, with its vision of the universe under the cosmic order of the Rainbow Serpent; it includes the orbit of the sun and moon, the wet and dry seasons and the entire cycle of human life and death. 'This is what most people don't understand,' Langton says. 'Aboriginal art is conceptual art, it's cosmological.' 65,000 Years looks to the future even while it maps the past, with more recent works by Trevor Nickolls, Harry J Wedge and Destiny Deacon illustrating the overtly activist leanings of contemporary Indigenous art. A work like Kaylene Whiskey's Seven Sistas story, painted on to a South Australian tourism road sign, playfully reimagines the seven sisters as pop culture figures like Whoopi Goldberg, Cher and Wonder Woman. Maximalist, intensely colourful and intrinsically interwoven with the artists' lived experience, these works are no repudiation of past practices, but a consolidation and natural progression. There are more than 400 works of art from First Nations artists in 65,000 Years, including rarely seen pieces from the University of Melbourne's own collection, alongside 193 loans from 77 public and private lenders. And yet, it only touches the surface of this vast, ongoing tradition. While endlessly fascinating and deeply moving for non-Indigenous audiences, it is indispensable for the future development of Aboriginal artists, whose work integrates and builds on the legacy of their forebears – and Langton hopes it will lead to an explosion of creativity: 'You can't be what you can't see, right?' 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is open at Potter Museum of Art until 22 November
CNA
4 days ago
- General
- CNA
Into the wild heart of Australia: Why the Northern Territory feels like another world
In Kakadu National Park, an easy drive from Darwin, you'll find some of the world's oldest art galleries. But these aren't framed on walls. Instead, they're etched onto ancient rock faces: Aboriginal artworks that date back as far as 20,000 years. Rich in detail and meaning, they're windows into a culture that's deeply connected to the land. And just like the stories they tell, the Northern Territory leaves a lasting impression. Home to sweeping landscapes and striking natural wonders, the Northern Territory boasts two distinct regions known fondly as the Top End and Red Centre. This land of contrasts invites travellers to indulge in diverse, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Begin in Darwin, a laidback capital where cultures meet and flavours mingle. Then venture out – hike to hidden waterfalls, swim in crystal-clear natural pools or cross the desert plains near Alice Springs before retreating to a barefoot luxury resort with Uluru on the horizon. This is Australia in its most authentic form – vast, ancient and alive with stories. It's not just a place you visit; it's a place you feel – raw, real, like nowhere else on earth. A GATEWAY TO EPIC ADVENTURES Start your journey in tropical Darwin and wander its breezy waterfront markets filled with multicultural eats and vibrant finds. Tip: The popular Mindil Beach Sunset Market is a wonderful spot for catching live music and sunsets. Before heading inland, consider a day trip to Tiwi Islands – a short flight or ferry ride from Darwin. These two islands offer a unique window into Aboriginal history and culture. Visit the Tiwi Design Art Centre and browse local art and crafts, often sold directly by the artists themselves – great for thoughtful, reasonably priced souvenirs. When you're ready for more adventures, take a 60-minute drive to Litchfield National Park. Swimsuits are essential – this lush monsoon forest is dotted with waterfalls and natural pools, perfect for a dip. And don't forget to stop for a selfie with the magnetic termite mounds – towering, otherworldly structures that can be over a century old. Alternatively, head to the UNESCO-listed Kakadu National Park. Beyond its famous Aboriginal rock art, Kakadu offers sacred landscapes, rich biodiversity and distinct experiences. Glide past crocodiles on a Yellow Water Billabong cruise or crank up the thrill with an airboat ride across the Mary River floodplains. Stay longer to soak in the grandeur of towering cliffs and remote waterfalls – there are plenty of accommodation options. Families will love the Mercure Kakadu Crocodile Hotel – shaped like a crocodile when viewed from above and packed with activities for kids. Couples can opt for a romantic escape at Bamurru Plains, where champagne stargazing is just part of the experience from your private safari bungalow. For the best weather, plan your visit between April and October during the dry season – when cooler nights and clear roads make exploring a breeze. FROM HOT SPRINGS TO SCENIC GORGES Ready for more cinematic adventures? Then head south to the Katherine region, where rugged landscapes are balanced by unexpected pockets of calm. The showstopper of the region is Nitmiluk National Park, home to 13 sandstone gorges carved over millennia by the Katherine River. The Nitmiluk Gorge is majestic – its sheer walls shifting in colour as the sun moves across the sky. Canoe or cruise? Both offer unforgettable perspectives. Paddle through the gorge at your own pace, passing ancient Aboriginal rock art, or opt for a relaxed cruise, complete with a dinner option. There's more relaxation to be found at the region's thermal springs. Katherine Hot Springs features naturally heated pools tucked along the riverbank, while Mataranka Thermal Pool is surrounded by palms that sway gently above you as you soak. Even the food here tells a story. Local flavours have evolved, blending native ingredients with inventive flair. Taste the catch of the day prepared with bush spices or try the slow-smoked Melaleuca brisket at Cicada Lodge, a boutique retreat that offers luxury wrapped in warm Jawoyn hospitality. Here, Aboriginal culture and art are part of the experience, not just the decor. AUSTRALIA'S SPIRITUAL HEART Watch the forest greens fade into the crimson hues of the desert as you journey south into the Red Centre. Begin your outback adventure in Alice Springs, your desert town portal to the territory. Visit the Kangaroo Sanctuary for a heartwarming encounter with Australia's most iconic resident or connect with Central Australian artists whose works tell Aboriginal Dreamtime stories through colour and canvas. Then, rising from the earth like a silent giant, Uluru awaits. Walk the base with an Aboriginal guide and hear the sacred stories woven into every curve and crevice of this monumental rock. As the day ends, stay for Wintjiri Wiru, a breathtaking light and drone show that brings the Anangu people's Mala story to life through lasers, sound and more than 1,000 choreographed drones dancing across the night sky. The Red Centre also offers moments of luxury set against its untouched wilderness. At Longitude 131°, wake up to the sight of Uluru through floor-to-ceiling windows, the desert stretched endlessly beyond. Remote yet refined, it's barefoot luxury at its most surreal. Wrap up your journey in style aboard The Ghan. This legendary rail experience winds north through desert plains, deep gorges and sweeping bushland – offering a final, unforgettable look at the Northern Territory's vast beauty. From ancient rock art to modern luxury beneath the stars, every moment here tells a story. And like the land itself, it invites you to slow down, connect and feel what it truly means to be alive.
SBS Australia
7 days ago
- SBS Australia
Correcting the record: Marcia Langton believes a new exhibition will change the way people see Indigenous art
Installation view of 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, 2025. Photography by Christian Capurro. A new exhibition at the University of Melbourne's Potter Museum will "correct the record" on the rich history of First Nations art, according to one of the country's most renowned academics. 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art features more than 400 works, encompassing bark paintings, sculptures, watercolour paintings, woven works and ceramics. Speaking to NITV News, senior curator and Distinguished Professor Marcia Langton said it was a blockbuster exhibition. "This exhibition is a groundbreaking exhibition that will show I think for the first time - I'm convinced this is the first time ever - the enormous diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art traditions, movements, periods of art, the brilliance of individual artists, that has ever been exhibited in Australia," she said. "Clearly, this is a unique contribution to global humanity of art and its unique to Australia – all the other art traditions came from elsewhere in the world, from Britain and Europe." It will change the way that people think about Indigenous art in Australia. The title of the exhibition is an ironic reference to the late acceptance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander works by the Australian art scene. Professor Langton said it was unbelievable that such "brilliant" art traditions were not widely recognised or respected by universities, curators or critics until the 1980s and 1990s. "We are correcting the record, visually, by having the best works by the greatest artists and also in context so that the meaning of the work and their history is very clear," she said. Many pieces in the exhibition provide rich historical background. Some are from the frontiers and other pieces include paintings of Makassan and Dutch ships by Anindilyakwa artists from Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory. Eastern Arrernte woman and associate curator Shanysa McConville said there were also many private pieces in the exhibition that have never been publicly displayed before. "There are over 400 works of art in this exhibition and 50 or so archival documents all of which really just want to get the point across that this is art - these people have been artists for thousands of years," she said. Almost 200 pieces have been loaned to the exhibition from 77 different public and private lenders, including from collectors in Europe - meaning many works will be seen by members of their artists' communities for the first time in decades. Artists from some of these communities have attended the exhibition preview to see how the works have been curated. "We want communities and descendants to come and engage with this work and connect to the work of their kin," Ms McConville said. Professor Langton said she was honoured that other items had been loaned directly to the museum from Traditional Owners, including works from groundbreaking 19th Century Wurundjeri artist and leader William Barak. "Works by William Barak have been acquired recently at an auction in New York by the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, they've lent us these precious works, as have the Dja Dja Wurrung people lent us their cultural collection which they have recently repatriated," she said. The exhibition - opening at the tail end of Reconciliation Week - will be the first show at the Potter Museum of Art once it reopens to the public on Friday, after being closed for redevelopment since 2017. It will be open to the public until November. Interviews and feature reports from NITV. A mob-made podcast about all things Blak life. The Point: Referendum Road Trip Live weekly on Tuesday at 7.30pm Join Narelda Jacobs and John Paul Janke to get unique Indigenous perspectives and cutting-edge analysis on the road to the referendum. Watch now
ABC News
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Marcia Langton 'delighted' and 'terrified' by new exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art
The long, woven eel trap in pale native grasses hovers above me. I've stepped through the new mirrored entrance into the redeveloped Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne; the building has become a monumental recognition and celebration of the artistic visions of the oldest continuing culture on earth. The sinuous eel trap, made by Dhauwurd Wurrung Gunditjmara artist Sandra Aitken, is suspended in space, no longer a fishing device but seemingly a container of history, of almost-lost weaving skills and of the memory of connection to land and creativity that not even decades of colonisation could erase. Ten years of painstaking work has culminated in an exhibition that not only brings together the infinite variety and long history of Aboriginal art, but that also recounts the brutal history of dispossession, subjection and scientific racism that is the dark heart of colonial history — and the subject of so many of these works. The exhibition is called 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art. It's a deliberately provocative title. It slices quickly to the point of what is almost certainly the most important exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art and design assembled in this country. Because Indigenous Australians have been making art for as long as they have been here, telling their stories, painting their place and recording their experiences and creative visions for millennia — but colonial recognition of that art has been a very long time coming. "I say it's a short history of Australian art,'' co-curator, writer and anthropologist Professor Marcia Langton says, "because Australian art, the art of this country, was not recognised as art until well into the 20th century, so it's both a truthful and an ironic title." The exhibition's curators are formidable women: Professor Langton, who was originally asked to create this show a decade ago; and curator and Arrernte woman Shanysa McConville, with historian and curator of Indigenous art Judith Ryan, who both joined the project in 2021. They are brilliant, insightful and dedicated curators. They hold every aspect of the broad, varied and long histories of Indigenous art in their minds, rapidly recalling fine details and important historical contexts. They are awe-inspiring company: in conversation with them, I work hard to keep up. The curatorial team consulted with communities around the country, sought the display of a major collection of historical Indigenous art and cultural objects, and have invited commissions of new work to establish a powerful timeline over centuries that Professor Langton says had to be done — "because it had never been done before". For the curators, the task of putting together this exhibition was cultural, historic and deeply personal. "I started out thinking that we have to address Australian history because the artists themselves do," Langton says. Not to do so, she says, "would be an act of cowardice". "Getting those chronologies right has been really important," McConville says. "The central and western desert room in particular has been close to my heart … I wanted to get that absolutely right." Brought together, the works are overwhelming. They extend from the very earliest bark paintings and cultural objects — all approved for public viewing — to the first colonial representations of Indigenous Australians. And there is work from every place, region and period of time in which art was created: former missions and settlements, deserts and homelands in and around the battlegrounds of the Australian Wars, and the suburbs and cities of new movements of contemporary Indigenous art. The three curators also include "hero" works from the celebrated art movements of Papunya, the Kimberley and the Spinifex people among others, with major paintings by Emily Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas, Carlene West and the Tjanpi Desert weavers. For Judith Ryan, much of the exhibition is a living tribute. "A lot of the walls are memorial walls — of loss, sorrow and death. You can't see this art separate from dispossession and massacre: it isn't separate from history — it's the intersection of art and history." McConville cites the room of early colonial painting as one of great significance to her, as the names, images and histories of important Aboriginal artists are depicted in the works. "It brings them into the room and into focus. Those works are more about these artists than the colonial painters themselves," she says. At the centre of the exhibition is the returned cultural pinnacle of the university's Indigenous collections: the Donald Thomson collection, which has been on long-term loan to Museums Victoria since 1973. The Melbourne anthropologist's collection is astonishing: Thomson is credited with making the world's most significant ethnographic collection of Aboriginal art and cultural objects, which he started in the 1930s. It comprises work from more than 90 communities in Cape York, Arnhem Land, the Central and Gibson Deserts, and beyond. The room in the Potter Museum that contains many of the Thomson pieces is painted green for the grasslands of their origin, and the precious bark paintings are thrillingly familiar and mysterious. But even in this extraordinary collection, there was something missing. "One of the things I noticed when I started going through the catalogues was that there were no works by women except for the weaving works that Donald Thomson collected," Professor Langton says. "But of course, none of the women are named." The curators specifically commissioned major pieces by contemporary women artists, including the mesmerising five-metre painting, Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country). Betty Muffler and Maringka Burton, respected Aṉangu ngangkari (traditional healers) based at Indulkana in the APY Lands, collaborated on the painting, which focuses on healing the country in the aftermath of British atomic testing at Maralinga and Emu Field during the 1950s. After 10 years' work, the exhibition has left its mark on its curators. "It feels like home," McConville says. "It's the greatest exhibition experience I have had," says Ryan who was senior curator of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Victoria for more than 40 years. When I tell her that I think it will blow people's minds, she quietly replies, "I hope so." Marcia Langton feels similarly. 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is at the Potter Museum of Art (Naarm/Melbourne) from May 30 to November 23, 2025. Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.
