Visible songs: Captured flight
Lena Djamarrayku | Rembarrnga people NT 1943–2005 | Worra (Ceremonial basket) (detail) 1997 | Twined pandanus palm leaf, cotton, feathers, coiled pandanus palm leaf handle, with natural pigments | 48 x 15cm (diam.) (with handle) | Purchased 2002. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © Lena Djamarrayku 1997. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2009
Diane Moon
So the two Sisters sat still in the tossing canoe, watching the great sea creature with eyes that were full of fear and half of wonder. ‘Surely it is like a great mat’, they say to one another softly, and the older one said she would weave a mat like it out of pandanus, ‘as we weave our hunting bags, only for the nganmarra we will make a fringe all around like the fins or ripples that are round the edge of that great fish’s body. Then when we see our sacred nganmarra we will remember this giant sunfish, for it is a wonder out here in the deep water.1
‘Floating Life: Contemporary Aboriginal Fibre Art’ is an exhibition of forms, textures and images from the Queensland Art Gallery’s Collection that highlights the importance of fibre in Aboriginal culture. Classic, useful objects are contrasted with reconfigurations by contemporary makers and are linked with paintings and objects which further elucidate their subtle meanings. The exhibition covers a broad spectrum of artists and themes, as well as focused representations by key artists, illustrating the vitality and creativity of their practices. A younger generation is making exciting original works, while their elders maintain cultural links and continue to pursue their own creative paths in a dynamic artistic movement.
The Gallery began developing its fibre art collection in earnest in 2002, and continued with important acquisitions of Queensland basketry for the major exhibition ‘Story Place: Indigenous Art of Cape York and the Rainforest’ in 2003. The unique bicornual jawun from Jumbun, Lockhart River’s delicate grass puunya, and the black palm fibre kakan from Mossman Gorge defined a new direction, with fibre works becoming a serious collection focus. ‘Floating Life’ grew from there. A clear map of places and makers was imagined through which to chart directions, and through commissions, opportunities and synchronicity, a vision was realised. In an era when the handmade is becoming increasingly rare, we are reminded that Aboriginal people have been making practical and decorative fibre objects of great beauty and refinement for millennia. The simple, rhythmic act of spinning and weaving personal and ritual pieces has indeed contributed greatly to their comfort, happiness and pleasure, and we can see in ‘Floating Life’ that weaving remains relevant in their lives.2
In ‘Floating Life’, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Lena Yarinkura and Shirley MacNamara are three artists for whom weaving is vital. After a life of nurturing, learning and teaching, weaving has been healing for Yvonne Koolmatrie in difficult times. It can also be a tool, with the potential to chip away at prejudices and negative attitudes towards her people. Reflecting on her experiences at the Venice Biennale in 1997, where she showed her monumental grass sculptures in ‘Fluent: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Judy Watson’, she saw the potential for change through weaving, which she describes as ‘a quiet revolution’. On her return from Venice to Australia, she found strength in reverie by the lower Murray River, observing the majestic scarred river gums where ancestors had long ago carved out bark canoes, and was moved to make a shallow coil-woven replica.
After seeing hot-air balloons on a visit to Mildura in 2004, Koolmatrie made a version fashioned from river rushes. Strand by strand, she built the rounded shape, with subtle gradations in the colour of the rushes gracing its spare form. Beautifully proportioned, with its basket attached with plied grass string, Hot-air balloon 2006 appears to be filled with hot air and ready for flight.
Always active and creative, Lena Yarinkura articulated the importance she placed on her weaving practice in conversation with anthropologist Christiane Keller:
I especially like weaving, when we go hunting or sitting somewhere, most people are doing nothing. If you do weaving, it can make you happy.3
A number of her works are included in ‘Floating Life’, but the pandanus sculpture Yawkyawk (Female water spirit) 2004, with her steady gaze and halo of white feather ‘hair’, typifies the artist’s own playful character.
The inherent qualities of strength and flexibility in the raw materials used by Shirley MacNamara could be a metaphor for a people who have struggled for cultural survival. Her exquisite Guutu (Vessel) 14 2001 embodies the invisible links she perceives between Aboriginal people and the lived textures of their culture. For this artist, the lateral roots of the spiny spinifex plant, twined into tough vessels, parallel the resilience of a nation called upon to survive their fluctuating fortunes and negative public attitudes.
Though fibre art has a long and enduring history in Aboriginal culture, knowledge of processes and techniques may have been lost to some over the past two centuries. A day trip away from Brisbane is the sublimely beautiful land of Minjerribah, known as Stradbroke Island. The road to the barge and ferry depot is lined with native hibiscus trees (Hibiscus tiliaceus) — gnarled trunks, big leaves, and short-lived yellow flowers with a deep red centre. Like many others along the northern Australian coastline, Moreton Bay Aboriginal people used native hibiscus bark to make strong fishing and hunting nets and multi-stranded ropes; they also spun a finer twine for the myriad uses that we all have for a piece of string.
With European settlement, their great nets were removed to encourage dependence, and the people were deprived of annual dugong feasts and seasonal gluts of fresh fish. Later, their lives were increasingly disrupted when building began in earnest, as oysters were rudely scooped up from the Bay in boatloads to be used in construction. In local museum collections, though, there are rare, tangible records of a refined material culture, including kulai — flat bags woven from moon-ga (reeds), which were stripped, soaked in running water, dried and processed in hot ashes.
These beautiful baskets were remarked on as early as 1836 when James Backhouse, a Quaker minister visiting the colonies to teach the gospel, was detained at the Amity Point Pilot Station on Minjerribah while waiting for weather calm enough for his ship to cross the South Passage Bar. A keen naturalist, he recorded his description of the unique diagonal patterning of the kulai:
The base of these rushes is of a pale colour, the portion included in the sheaths at the base, or just emerging from them, is of a pinky hue and the top green. By arranging the knots so as to form diagonal lines across the bag, the colours are brought into tasteful order.4
Such treasures of refined ornamentation and elegant design survive in Australian and international museum collections... Next
Visible songs: Captured flight | On weaving | Background | String | Narrative and performance | Body adornment | Environment | Past, present, future | Fibre connections | Endnotes
