Indigenous Art of the Kimberley > New Energy: Mananambarra
On the white walls of the gallery the large paintings of Wandjina by senior Kimberley artist Omborrin beam forth filling the room with the radiance of his beloved Kimberley homelands.
Yvonne Boag is a traveller, a wanderer and keen surveyor of her surroundings. Her concerns of language and place traverse a myriad of media such as paintings, prints and drawings in a career spanning three decades. As Boag commented in 1989 With every new work I start, it seems I am always at a beginning. Each work is an attempt to hold on to time. To make marks of that time, which will trace a pattern through my life& Through this text Donna Brett looks at Boags journeys to places such as Korea, Paris and the Lockhart River and her use of iconography and dense layering as a means of mapping her interaction with places, journeys and people. Some artistic influences here discussed include the works of Roger Hilton, William Scott, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Avis Newman. The Lockhart River, Urban Landscape and Conversations series are referred to in considerable detail.
This January, in the startlingly beautiful country of the Warmun Community, rained in by a particularly intense wet season, art matriarch and grandmother of eighteen, Mabel Juli, sat on the veranda of the Ngalangpum School looking through some of the old paintings which comprise the Warmun Community Collection.
People involved in the arts and education might have difficulty recognising the Australia that the Treasurer has been talking up recently: the one with the record 4% low unemployment. But the Treasurers spin fails to mention that to be counted as employed you only have to work one hour per week, which bears out the reality of a life in the arts.
The symbolic and perpetual possibilities of pattern are constantly under interrogation in the work of Sara Hughes as she is compelled to inhabit the capricious edges of what painting might be. Being a child of her times, Hughes was part of the sticker generation who adorned the unsuspecting surfaces of schoolbooks, bedroom walls, wardrobes, mirrors and fridges. She applies similar processes to her work as a means of mimicking the act of making something ones own and thus reinforces the claiming and transforming of spatial environments. This article follows Hughes practice through the visitation of childhood moments while simultaneously offering a platform for new conversations about spatial interplays and the shifting dialogues between surface and form, codes and perception and graphic modes and painterly references. Some of Hughes' primary influences include William Gibsons 2003 novel Pattern Recognition and the works of Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Yoshinori Tanaka and Sergio Leone.