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.
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.
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.
Robert Owens longstanding interest in exploring dimensions of light and space beyond the merely visual reaches back into an important line of constructivist art of the early twentieth century. Experiments with form and material have characterised Owens practice throughout his career, as has his openness to heterogeneous influences. Some of the major influences on Owens practice include metaphysical philosophy, Buddhist spirituality, optics, geometry in physics, minimalist sculpture and the work of Marcel Duchamp. This article refers to the works of Naum Gabo, De Stijl, Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus, Lynden Dadswell, Walter Gropius, Chairman Clift, George Johnston, Leonard Cohen, Jack Hirshman, Jean-François Lyotard, Charles Biederman, David Bohm and Stephen Hyde.