M A L A L U B A G U M A N A

Transcription

1 MALALUBA GUMANA

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4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Published 2015 by Annandale Galleries 600 copies Copyright Annandale Galleries ISBN Design by Anne & Bill Gregory Production by Ana Lopez Catalogue photography by Murray Fredericks Landscape photography by Peter Eve All barks & poles natural earth pigments & pva fixative Printed by Sydney s Print & Promotion Solutions Front cover Malaluba Gumana Garrimala (detail) 205 x 90 cm BLA 938 Fronticepiece Malaluba Gumana Garrimala (detail) 136 x 79 cm BLA 947 Back cover Djirrirra Wunungmurra Buyku (detail) 48 x 129 cm 48 x 129 cm BLA 961

5 MALALUBA GUMANA DJIRRIRRA WUNUNGMURRA Opening Reception Wednesday 12 August 2015 Exhibition dates 11 August - 12 September 2015 In association with Buku - Larrnggay Mulka Arts Yirrkala NE Arnhem Land ANNANDALE GALLERIES 110 Trafalgar Street Annandale Sydney NSW 2038 Australia Telephone (61-2) Fax (61-2) annangal@oz .com.au Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11:00-5:00 pm Directors Anne & Bill Gregory

6 NEIGHBOURS Will Stubbs Director of Buku-Larrngay Mulka Malaluba Gumana and Djirrirra Wunungmurra live at a place far from the world of Annandale Galleries. If you travel 700 kms from Darwin you will come to Yirrkala. This road is only open 8 months a year. If you drive for four hours from Yirrkala you will not pass one house, one streetlight, one shop, one petrol station, one habitable structure of any kind on your way to their home, Gangan, amongst the Stringybark forest. In this tiny settlement of ten houses live a hugely disproportionate number of artists who excel. Besides having both grown up as neighbours in Gangan, Malaluba and Djirrirra have another thing in common. They are both winners of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award first prize for bark painting. Djirrirra in 2012 and Malaluba in In this they are joined by their other neighbor Garawan Wanambi who won in 2014 and Gawirrin Gumana AO who won the overall First prize in Also amongst the tiny hamlet is Gunybi Ganambarr who won the West Australian Indigenous Art Award First Prize in If you add to this the fact that Djirrirra s now deceased father Yanggarriny Wunungmurra won the NATSIAA First Prize himself in 1996 and her brother Nawurapu who lives at Gangan won the 2010 New Media Award in the same competition you can see why some people wonder what is in the water at Gangan! The literal answer to this question is revealed in Djirrirra s work. These incised barks carry the deep code for the waters of Gangan itself. Here are the sacred diamond patterns which are etched into the Dhalwangu soul. This essence and identity was formed as the giant ancestral being Barama arose from the mud in the riverbed at Gangan. Silt struck by the sunlight as it streams down his chest. Barama s emergence commences the Yirritja moiety creation for all of East Arnhem. On the Dhuwa side is Malaluba s Wititj or Rainbow Serpent. Cyclone, tempest, rainbows, olive pythons, lilies, file snakes, the billabongs of Garrimala are all within these designs. The ceremonies of the Rainbow Serpent people like the Galpu which are ongoing are known to have been recorded in rock paintings thousands of years old. But as old as these ideas are their manifestation is contemporary and unique in the hands of these two artists. Malaluba pioneered a technique of grinding and mixing on the rock the pure colours of red, yellow, black and white into combined admixtures and then storing them in liquid form in containers. This is how she is able to maintain colour consistency in olive, grey and pink across a massive work despite using natural earth pigments. Djirrirra also mixes colours outside the primaries and has a long history of innovation. In this exhibition she has taken the incision of bark to a heightened and unprecedented level. Even after over twenty years in the job of liaising between the remote peoples of Gangan and the audience at Annandale I cannot really comprehend how so few people could generate so much excellence from such an isolated source. I sincerely hope that this exhibition can convey the truly remarkable phenomenon I have tried to describe here. 4

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8 6 Garrimala 2014 natural earth pigments on found particle board 121 x 121 cm BLA 932

9 Garrimala 2014 natural earth pigments on found particle board 240 x 120 cm BLA 931 7

10 8 Garrimala 2014 natural earth pigments on found particle board 240 x 120 cm BLA 933

11 Garrimala x 81 cm BLA 944 9

12 10 Garrimala x 73 cm BLA 949

13 Garrimala x 90 cm BLA

14 12 Garrimala x 79 cm BLA 947

15 Garrimala x 127 cm BLA

16 Garrimala x 129 cm BLA 934 Garrimala x 50 cm BLA

17 Garrimala x 46 cm BLA

18 Garrimala x 29 cm BLA 958 Garrimala x 43 cm BLA 970 Garrimala x 34 cm BLA

19 Garrimala x 29 cm BLA 930 Garrimala x 31 cm BLA 935 Garrimala x 22 cm BLA

20 Garrimala x 21 cm BLA 948 Garrimala x 27 cm BLA 950 Garrimala x 21 cm BLA

21 Milmilngkan x 36 cm BLA 927 Milmilngkan x 17 cm BLA 926 Milmilngkan x 24 cm BLA

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23 BIOGRAPHY Father was Gumuk Gumana, mother was Marratj Gurruwiwi. A very fine exponent of marwat - the cross hatching technique using a hair brush. Malaluba mainly paints her mother s Gålpu clan designs of dhatam (waterlilly), djari (rainbow), djayku\ (filesnake) and wititj (olive python). From 2006 onwards her art centre encouraged her to produce larger and more complex works to fully explore her fluid and spontaneous hand. She embraced this opportunity wholeheartedly and tapped a vein of prolific production. An exhibition of her bark and hollow logs sold out in July 2008 at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne. EXHIBITIONS 2005 Ngann Girra Festival Albury Regional Museum 2007 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, Museum and Art Gallery of the NT, Darwin 2007 Galuku Gallery, Festival of Darwin, NT 2007 Bukulu\thunmi - Coming Together, One Place, Raft Artspace, Darwin, NT 2008 March, Niagara Galleries, Blue Chip X - Collectors Exhibition Melbourne, Vic 2008 Outside Inside - bark and hollow logs from Yirrkala, Bett Gallery Hobart, Tas 2008 Garrimala - Bark paintings and Memorial Poles, Niagara Galleries, Richmond Vic th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, Museum and Art Gallery of the NT, Darwin, NT 2008 Gapan Gallery - Bendt Prints, Garma Festival Site, Gulkula, NT 2008 Galuku Gallery - Berndt Prints, Darwin Festival, Botanical Gardens, Darwin, NT 2008 A Few Real Gems I Have Come Across, Mogo Raw Art and Blues, Mogo, NSW 2008 New Generations Yirrkala artists, Creative Economy, Brisbane 2009 Larrakitj - the Kerry Stokes Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, WA 2009 After Berndt - Indigenart - Mossenson Gallery, Perth, WA 2009 Diamonds and Rainbows Larrakitj and Bark Paintings of Garrilmala, Raft Artspace, Darwin, NT 2010, 17th Biennale of Sydney, Larrakitj - the Kerry Stokes Collection, Museum on Contemporary Art, Sydney, NSW 2010 Ralapiny - Small Pearls from Yirrkala Annandale Galleries, Sydney, NSW COLLECTIONS Woodside Energy Ltd. Art Collection National Gallery of Australia Estate of Kerry Packer Art Gallery of New South Wales Larrakitj Collection of Kerry Stokes BIBLIOGRAPHY Catalogue: 17th Biennale of Sydney - The Beauty of Distance, Songs of Survival, in a Precarious Age. ISBN AWARDS Use of her Dhatam imagery for Garma 2008 T-shirt and promotional material 21

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27 DJIRRIRRA WUNUNGMURRA

28 26 Buyku x 202 cm BLA 959

29 Buyku x 113 cm BLA

30 28 Buyku x 64 cm BLA 952

31 Buyku x 44 cm BLA

32 30 Buyku x 60 cm BLA 946

33 Buyku x 70 cm BLA

34 32 Buyku x 46 cm BLA 945

35 Buyku x 75 cm BLA 963 Buyku x 28.5 cm BLA

36 34 Buyku x 129 cm BLA 961

37 Buyku x 45 cm BLA 964 Buyku x 36 cm BLA 965 Buyku x 21.5 cm BLA 969 Buyku x 45 cm BLA

38 Buyku x 17 cm BLA 941 Buyku x 48 cm BLA 968 Buyku x 48 cm BLA 962 Buyku x 27 cm BLA

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41 BIOGRAPHY Djirrirra (also known as Yukuwa) assisted her father, Yanggarriny Wunungmurra ( ), in his Telstra Award winning painting of 1997 and continually up until his death in She has also assisted her brother Nawurapu Wunungmurra, but now primarily paints her own works. Her father granted her this authority whilst he was alive. Her precise hand and geometric style has increasingly attracted enthusiastic interest from the art world. As she came to the notice of Buku- Larrnggay co-ordinators for her exquisite hand and innovative composition she was included in her first major exhibition and her first visit to the world outside of Arnhem Land, in a show at Raft Artspace in Darwin in 2006 which featured her and two other Gangan artists, Yumutjin Wunungmurra and Waturr Gumana. In 2007 she was selected for Cross Currents, a major art survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Her rise to a level of notice was cemented when she was awarded the TOGA Northern Territory Contemporary Art Award in From here she was invited to her first solo show at Vivien Anderson Gallery in She has lived at the remote homeland of Gangan since she was born (before Western housing was erected) and has three children. She has exhibited in the US and China and in Australia with Vivien Anderson Gallery in Melbourne and Short street in Broome. In 2012 she followed her father and brother as a Telstra winner with Best Bark at the 29th NATSIAA with a new theme - Yukuwa. EXHIBITIONS 2005 Ngann Girra Festival Albury Regional Museum 2006 Bulayi - Small Gems Suzanne O Connell Gallery Brisbane 2006 Arnhem Land Ochres Mina Mina Art Gallery Brunswick Heads 2007 Galuku Gallery, Festival of Darwin, NT 2007 Bukulu\thunmi - Coming Together, One Place, Raft Artspace, Darwin, NT 2007 Cross Currents - Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, NSW 2008 Togart Contemporary Art Award, New Convention Centre, Darwin - Winner 2008 Outside Inside - Bett Gallery Hobart, Tasmania 2008 A Few Real Gems I Have Come Across, Mogo Raw Art and Blues, Mogo, NSW 2009 Larrakitj - the Kerry Stokes Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, WA 2009 Woman s Show - Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne, Vic 2009 Buyku, Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne, Vic th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, MAGNT, Darwin, NT 2010 The White Show, Short Street Gallery, Broome, WA 2010 The Womens Show 2010, Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne, Broome WA 2010 Indigenous Art of the Northern Territory, from north east Arnhem Land to the Western Desert, Chunshen Cultural Square, Shanghai, China th Biennale of Sydney, Larrakitj - the Kerry Stokes Collection, Museum on Contemporary Art, Sydney, NSW 2010 Returning to Djakapurra - A Collection of Poles and Barks from Yirrkala, Redot Gallery, Singapore 2010 Djirrirra and Dhuwarrwarr, Bark Paintings at Santa Fe, Chiaroscuro Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico in conjunction with the Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne Vic th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, Museum and Art Gallery of the NT, Darwin, NT 2010 Yukuwa - Bark Paintings and Larrakitj, Short Street Gallery, Broome, WA 2011 Womens Show, Vivien Anderson Gallery 2011 Miyalk - Women Feminine art from Yirrkala Framed Gallery Darwin th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, Museum and Art Gallery of the NT, Darwin, NT 2011 Rite of Spring / Rrarrandharr Cross Art Projects Sydney 2012 I am Yukuwa, Vivien Anderson Gallery COLLECTIONS Woodside Energy Ltd. Art Collection Kerry Stokes Collection Colin and Liz Laverty, Sydney Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, Australia Levi Kaplan Collection, Seattle, WA, USA Toga Group of Companies National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT Parliament House Collection, Canberra, ACT Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, NT Queensland Art Gallery Bibliography Catalogue: Cross Currents - Focus n Australian Contemporary Art. A publication by the Museum of Contemporary Art pp Catalogue: 17th Biennale of Sydney - The Beauty of Distance, Songs of Survival, in a Precarious Age. AWARDS 2008 Winner - Togart NT Contemporary Award for Winner - 29th NATSIAA Best Bark 39

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