Across the vast state of Western Australia Aboriginal artistic practice is thriving – whether it’s the continuation of centuries-old techniques informed by tradition, or forays into exciting mediums – the ambitious output is as rich and diverse as WA itself, and will be celebrated once more at Revealed, Fremantle Arts Centre’s popular annual program dedicated to showcasing the best new and emerging Aboriginal artists who call the state home.
Revealed Exhibition: New & Emerging WA Aboriginal Artists
Opening 6:30pm Fri 6 May / Runs Sat 7 May – Sun 24 July
This year the Revealed Exhibition will open on Friday 6 May and run until Sunday 24 July, a significant calendar shift that sees Revealed coincide with both NAIDOC and National Reconciliation Weeks.
Featuring the work of 100 new and emerging talents in 2022, the Revealed Exhibition is now a cornerstone of the WA arts calendar.
Revealed showcases the creative works of emerging artists at varying stages of their lives, from young people exploring photography and film to older people who have only recently started painting their Country or who are exploring new mediums and processes. In this way, Revealed offers a unique snapshot of emerging Aboriginal art practice from across Western Australia.
With over 250 works, the 2022 Revealed Exhibition features artists from 29 Aboriginal Art Centres and nine independent artists. Fremantle Arts Centre’s galleries will be filled with a vibrant breadth of painting, installation, textiles, photography, print media, video, jewellery, weaving and sculpture.
“Revealed is a joy and a celebration, for artists and our communities. The Revealed Exhibition brings together emerging artists at all stages of their lives and showcases Aboriginal art making in all of its diversity and complexity, revealing rich and multi-layered cultural conversations about our histories, our lives and our belongings,” said Fremantle Arts Centre Visual Arts Curator, Glenn Iseger-Pilkington.
“Walking through Revealed, you’re filled with a sense of wonder at the stories shared – from ancient narratives of the Dreaming to the funny quirks of Arts Centre life.”
Artists were selected for the 2022 Revealed Exhibition by a panel of industry experts comprised of Glenn Iseger-Pilkington, Sharyn Egan and Carly Lane.
“Revealed is a critical moment in the national calendar for Western Australian Aboriginal artists and connects deeply with Fremantle Art Centre’s overall curatorial commitment to connecting people through truth-telling and powerful narratives of place,” said Fremantle Arts Centre Director Anna Reece.
All works in the Revealed Exhibition are for sale.
To view the full list of exhibiting artists, visit the Revealed Exhibition page.
Miriam Baadjo painting Nyinmi collaborative on Return to Country camp. Image courtesy Warlayirti Artists. Photography by Lucinda White
Revealed WA Aboriginal Art Market (online event)
Fri 27 – Sun 29 May
After a successful online debut in 2021, which attracted over 15,000 visitors from more than 50 countries around the world, the Revealed WA Aboriginal Art Market is anticipated to be bigger and better in 2022 – with an enormous selection of quality paintings, textiles, carved artefacts, homewares, prints, clothing, ceramics, jewellery and more to choose from.
With ongoing COVID travel restrictions, the Revealed Market will return as an online event from Friday 27 – Sunday 29 May, ensuring vital income for the artists and Arts Centre who take part.
The Revealed Market exists to provide an ethical avenue for purchasing original art from art centres and independent artists across the state, in one place, with 100% of all profits raised from sales return to the participants.
The Revealed Market is open to all WA Aboriginal artists – emerging, mid-career and senior – with works priced from as little as $50, catering for first-time buyers through to collectors and investors.
Media Enquiries
Please contact Rosamund Brennan
rosamundb@fremantle.wa.gov.au / 08 9432 9565
Header image: Dora Parker, Pukara (detail), 2021, acrylic on canvas, 110 x 85cm. Image courtesy the artist and Spinifex Arts Project
In light of yesterday’s announcement by the WA State Government introducing Level 2 public health measures from this Thursday 3 March, we wanted to share how this will impact Fremantle Arts Centre’s programs and events.
Our beautiful grounds, our shop FOUND, and Canvas Café will all remain open.
GALLERIES
– Our galleries with our current exhibition Undertow will remain open
– Our Curator Tours will go ahead on Sat 26 Mar + Fri 1 Apr
– Our Tactile Tours have been cancelled
FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE
– Buster the Fun Bus and Friday Story Time will both proceed outdoors in our Front Garden
CLASSES
All our scheduled learning classes will be running as planned. Class numbers are all safely within 2sqm limits and masks are mandatory.
FAC YEAH! COMMUNITY CHOIR
Will be paused, effective immediately. Tonight’s session (1 Mar) will not take place so we look forward to resuming when we can all sing together, uninhibited, once more.
SPECIAL EVENTS
Disclosure with Gemma Weston (22 Mar) and An Evening with the Collection (23 Mar) will go ahead. These events will be moved to our Front Garden to ensure greater social distancing can be observed throughout. Registration to attend these events will now be required. Please visit the event pages on our website to do so.
Pecha Kucha Karaoke (11 Mar) has been cancelled.
MUSIC
Sunday Music will proceed with a capacity limit of 500. All patrons will need to wear a mask at all times while at the event. We recommend you arrive early.
Updates about our upcoming music shows will be made in the coming days and weeks, in consultation with the event promoters.
A reminder that FAC is a vaccine-mandated site and proof of vaccination is required for entry. Please visit https://www.wfac.org.au/about/covid-safe/ for details. Capacity limits will be in place so we ask all visitors to enter the building via reception so this can be monitored.
We thank you, our amazing community, for your understanding as we navigate the challenges Omicron presents. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us at artscentre@fremantle.wa.gov.au
At the Ridges of Our Hands – Project Team
Linda Iriza
Soul Alphabet Coordinator
Born 1998, Kigali, Rwanda
Lives and works Kwinana, Walyalup | Fremantle and Boorloo | Perth, Western Australia
Linda Iriza is a Rwandan people weaver, creative producer and artist currently living on Nyoongar Boodjar. Her work includes community engagement and arts projects, and she is co-founder of Soul Alphabet, an organisation committed to amplifying the voices of People of Colour and celebrating the cultures of the African diaspora here in Western Australia.
Elsa Weldemical (Soul Alphabet), Hair braider for the project At the ridges of our hands. Photography by Jim Hall
Elsa Weldemical
Hair Braiding Artist
Born 1990, Tigray
Lives and works in Boorloo | Perth, Western Australia
Elsa Weldemical is a mother, committed to celebrating and continuing her Tigrayan culture in Boorloo. She braids the hair of women in her community for culturally significant ceremonies and celebrations. Elsa’s passion is for her children.
Emele Ugavule
Soul Alphabet Collaborator
Born 1993, Takapuna, Aotearoa New Zealand
Lives and works between Bindjareb Boodja and Boorloo | Perth, WA
Emele Ugavule is a Tokelauan Fijian storyteller. Her research and practice is centred on Oceanic Indigenous-led storytelling, working across live performance, film, tv & digital media as a writer, director, creative producer, performer, educator and mentor. Emele collaborates with organisations that unite community through story, including Soul Alphabet and is the founder of Studio Kiin.
Shanice Mwathi (Soul Alphabet), Hair braider for the project At the ridges of our hands. Photography by Jim Hall
Shanice Keeru Mwathi
Photographer
Born 1998 Nairobi, Kenya
Lives and works Boorloo | Perth, Whadjuk Boodjar, Western Australia
Shanice Mwathi is a photographer and videographer who enjoys working on branding projects and photo portriatiure. Shanice’s work often approaches abstract themes and is informed by her African-Australian experience and she loves that I can represent this community in her work.
Patient Beyan
Braider
Lives and works in Boorloo | Perth, Western Australia
Patient Beyan has over 10 years of experience in her hair braiding practice, a craft that has always been performed in her Liberian and wider-African community for centuries. The hair experience is important to her as it is a celebration of self-love, trust, connection, and an embodiment of ancestral knowledge.
Chiluba Young (Soul Alphabet), Hair braider for the project At the ridges of our hands. Photography by Jim Hall
Chiluba Young
Photographer
Born 1996, Lusaka, Zambia
Lives and works Boorloo | Perth, Whadjuk Boodjar, Western Australia
Chiluba Young is a Boorloo-based photographer who started photography with the intent of building friendships with African women in Australia who shared her life experiences. Representing women through photography has become a passion for her. Chiluba’s work seeks to address the lack of representation of Black women, particularly within the arts community in Western Australia.
Follow Soul Alphabet on Instagram: @soul.alphabet
Works for sale
A selection of Chiluba Young and Shanice Mwathi‘s Undertow works are available to purchase. Visit our sales page for details.
CURATOR’S REFLECTIONS: SOUL ALPHABET
In this sense, braiding is not just an aesthetic form with a history, it is a literature of the skull; an art with its own canon; it heralds unbroken lines of intimate memory passed from generation to generation.
Sisonke Msimang, 2022
Oceans have long been places of journey, a theatre of people moving across time and place. While oceans feature in many of our narratives, often they are spaces of longing, the space between us and our families, our homelands, or our histories.
When we travel, when we choose a new place in the world to live, we take so much of ourselves, of our ancestors and the worlds we have inhabited with us, we find people in our new communities who are able to relate to our own experiences and find comfort in being understood without being asked for an explanation.
The photographic project At the Ridges of Our Hands explores the practices that travel with the movement of people, by showcasing braiding traditions of African communities living in Boorloo & Walyalup, away from the African continent. These powerful photographic works depict both the practice and outcome of braiding, but more importantly, they reveal intimate spaces of connection, belonging and community. Through their lenses, photographers Shanice Keeru Mwathi and Chiluba Young take us on a journey into these spaces, they reveal to us not just a process of beautification, but a lineage of knowledge and a network of memory embodied within the hands and minds of braiders across the globe, all which trace back to the African continent, to homelands that people will always belong to.
At the Ridges of Our Hands is an initiative of Soul Alphabet, a small organisation committed to amplifying the voices of People of Colour, with a focus on working alongside those belonging to the African diaspora. At the Ridges of Our Hands celebrates the enduring influence that the African diaspora have style and aesthetics globally, recentering the African diaspora at the heart of all that is cool.
CALL & RESPONSE: ‘WE COOL’ BY SISONKE MSIMANG
The following text was commissioned for Undertow, as a response to the narratives, themes, and ideas in Soul Alphabet’s exhibited works. Sisonke Msimang is a Boorloo-based, South African writer, activist and political analyst whose works explore race gender and politics.
I love us when we are ordinary and unspectacular
I am interested in the contemporary, in the modern; in the way Black people live in now-time.
I am interested in how we make space today for what might emerge tomorrow.
I am interested in present-day renderings of African life and Black diasporic life because too often, when Black people show up in galleries, on white walls in cool buildings that have long colonial memories, we are representatives of some dark past, rendered as evidence of the sadness (and occasionally joy) that emanate from a dark continent.
We appear veiled in sadness; draped in big feelings – good or bad. We are seldom captured in in-between moments. We are never twenty-first century people doing twenty-first century things. We are chained to our pasts. It is easy to forget when you look at us in exhibitions, that we invented cool.
I could spend time – as many have – excavating the many African histories Europeans tried to kill during the Enlightenment when they believed they discovered individual rights and science and when they invented race. In creating the myth of their intellectual superiority, they dreamed up a new racial taxonomy in which white was on top and black was on the bottom; in which white was the opposite of black; in which slavery was justified. It posited that dark-skinned people were pre-modern which meant we were enslave-able and had to be saved from our own wretchedness.
But I am disinclined to disprove scientific and other kinds of racism because, as Toni Morrison reminds us, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”1
So, I see us as future people and am not interested in being detained by dredging up “one more thing,” which keeps me from doing my work. I would rather do my work, which is to imagine into the certainty of the future because nothing can be more important than to secure life on this planet in the days that come after tomorrow.
Black art has always been about making a way where there appears to be none and braiding is the art of making tracks, of moving away from one destination and towards another. Braids are lines on a scalp that become a pattern, that make their wearer a beauty to behold. African art has always been deeply invested in the aesthetics of balance and braids are nothing if not a work of balance. Braids are a metaphor then; a path and a creative impulse. And lest you accuse me of forgetting where we come from, yes, braiding is also about memory. The neat lines and clean rows that flow from a braider’s hand are a measure of how she was taught; a reflection of the woman who taught the braider. Braiding does not emerge as a skill miraculously out of thin air.
In this sense, braiding is not just an aesthetic form with a history, it is a literature of the skull; an art with its own canon; it heralds unbroken lines of intimate memory passed from generation to generation.
In Yoruba ontology, the human personality consists of three elements: ara (body), emi (soul) and ori (inner head).2 One’s success or failure in life depends on the head. Adorning the head then, is a way of honouring the ori.
As a child I have many memories of sitting on the floor with my head leaning back into my mother’s lap. I always wriggled because the hot comb would singe my ears. My mother would say ‘my girl you have to suffer for beauty.’ The proto-feminist in me hated this phrase. I would squirm more, in anticipated fear, the smell of burning hair mocking me. She would tighten her grip on my torso with her legs and I would be stilled by force. But then the hard part would be over and once my hair my hair was straight, the kinks burned out of it by the hot comb, I would relax into the plaiting. I loved that part of the bi-weekly ritual. My mother had soft hands and my head was never sore afterwards. I was always pleased afterwards. I would look in the hand mirror she put in front of my face and my eyes would be pulled taut and high and everyone would say how beautiful I was. My uncle would call me Cleopatra and my cousin would say I looked like Queen Nandi.
When I was older, in university, missing my mother and her soft hands, I sat in an art class and learned about the “aesthetics of cool.” My lecturer refenced Robert Farris Thompson, the grandfather of cool and suddenly I understood something I had only intuited.
Farris Thompson tells us that “coolness has to do with transcendental balance. Manifest within this philosophy of the cool is the belief that the purer, the cooler, a person becomes the more ancestral he becomes. In other words, mastery of self enables a person to transcend time and elude preoccupation.”3 In other words, to be cool is an ethic, a stylised way of exhibiting beauty and exhibit calmness. To be cool is to “be nonchalant in times of stress.”4 This philosophy predates the arrival of Europeans, but it has assisted Black people everywhere in surviving the colonial encounter with remarkable creativity.
My mother’s words were not simply the feminist betrayal I had imagined them to be. She was instructing me in an ethic of beauty that went beyond the superficial. She wasn’t (just) glorifying pain; she was also teaching me how to cool down; how to endure; how to master myself in service of respectability (she was after all, middle-class) but more importantly, in service of what Helena Andrews has called, Black women’s “coolness coat of arms.” She was helping me to develop a mask, “our impenetrable shield.”5
She was also instructing me in the reality that African aesthetics are never just about the cover. What is on the outside matters because of the spirit it protects. When my relatives called me Nandi and Cleopatra, they were not simply saying I was pretty, they were seeing me; they were recognising my ori.
The photographs exhibited in Undertow telegraph our ori. They remind me that I love us when we are ordinary and unspectacular. They tell me we make beautiful things everyday – out of the ridges of our hands. In these pictures African women are not detained by the camera nor distracted by its gaze. The women in these photographs are searching the skies, on the lookout for unidentified objects on the horizon. In these pictures our gazes are fixed firmly on the future.
Gurl, in these photos, we cool.
Sisonke Msimang, 2022
1 Part of a speech Morrison made at Portland State University in 1975 entitled, A Humanist View. You can listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/portland-state-library/portland-state-black-studies-1
2 Lawal, Babatunde. “Orí: The Significance of the Head in Yoruba Sculpture.” Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 41, no. 1, [University of New Mexico, University of Chicago Press], 1985, pp. 91–103, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3630272.
3 Thompson, Robert Farris. p. 41 in “An Aesthetic of the Cool.” African Arts, vol. 7, no. 1, UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center, 1973, pp. 41–91, https://doi.org/10.2307/3334749
4 Ibid.
5 Black people: Naturally Cool? A conversation on NPR radio between Margo Jefferson and Helena Andrews. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=147501624
About the Artist
Born 1965, Whadjuk Country, Western Australia
Lives and works Undalup | Busselton, Wardandi Nyoongar Boodja, Western Australia
Badimia (Yamatji) and Yued (Nyoongar) Peoples, Western Australia
@moorditj_manda
A Badimia and Yued woman, born on Whadjak Country, Amanda Bell has a diverse creative repertoire, working with sculptural materials, video, sound, textiles, found objects, and most recently neon lighting. Ambitious and experimental, her practice is dedicated to “… trying new ways of telling stories that are sometimes uncomfortable and painful, sometimes fun and frivolous.”
She has participated in several group exhibitions, including Fremantle Arts Centre’s Revealed and Bunbury Regional Art Centre’s Noongar Country, and her work is held in
various state and private collections.
Works for sale
Amanda’s Undertow work is available to purchase. Visit our sales page for details.
CURATOR’S REFLECTIONS: AMANDA BELL
Balak (Naked), 2022
glass neon, LED lights, sound, yongka (kangaroo) bones, salt, sand, tea, flour, sugar, dried flowers, synthetic polymer paint.
Amanda Bell’s newly commissioned work Balak (Naked), 2022, approaches the themes of wardarn or oceans through a lens of personal and collective trauma. This significant installation, comprised of neon glass, audio, written word, marri gum and collected yongka (kangaroo) bones, asks us to reflect upon recent histories for First Nations people, those of colonial invasion and dispossession inflicted by the British in their strategic assault and takeover of this continent.
Bell once again employs glass neon to convey deeply moving words, this time in bold red and in English, the coloniser’s tongue. The words ‘our silence is full of rage’ are etched in light as if scratched into the very wall. They cast a haunting glow across the gallery, as if it were blood-soaked, and speak to the silence she has encountered when talking about colonial and recent atrocities with her elders.
Bell reminds us that these silences are not empty spaces, but instead they are spaces of deep anger and immense sorrow, and that silence is not always powerless, that a lot can be said, conveyed and felt in responses made of silence.
At the end of the room, in a grave-like shallow illuminated with light, lay the skeletal remains of a kangaroo resting upon a bed of salt/sand. Delicately and reverently hand-painted in marri gum, they speak to the great horrors of this continent, of unwritten histories and of the blood spilled on boodja in the attempted genocide of First Peoples since invasion in 1829.
Bell’s use of neon, known for its role in advertising and signage, and LED lighting, now commonplace in both domestic and commercial settings, anchors us in there here and now, reminding us of the continuation of colonial rule, ongoing attempts of cultural erasure and systemic racism that plagues the psyche of this continent.
Glenn Iseger-Pilkington
Untitled: BY AMANDA BELL
The following poem was written by Amanda Bell, with the response in this instance being that of the same words being translated into Nyoongar, one of the ancestral languages of the artist which often features within her work.
Untitled, by Amanda Bell
When did I know you?
Not when we were taken, and we had no voice.
Ashamed, you were hidden from me, or did you hide?
The wadjella took my skin and my kin
My kin! Hidden and hurting.
In my kambarang I felt you from inside,
just stirring, dawning like an old one remembering horror from the spring.
Silenced again in that tomb-sized classroom.
That fucking, racist, violent room,
where red and white lies, defile the last grave.
Again, in the Birak, you broke through my skin.
Bunuru touching me with your pale spider fingers.
Altered forever,
Kalyakool.
This time you came screaming to the surface, breathless.
So breathless I could not speak,
I thought maybe I would never speak again.
And then came the change in the wind.
And, deeper I felt you clawing to get out, out of me and all of us,
when the world turns rusted red in Djeran
Is it worse that now my body knows yours?
Now our hot blood leapt and pumped on a Makuru flower
Now that it’s finished where I began.
Is it worse that now I know my tongue?
I’m tried and tired and can’t ever lie with you and make that crying, perfect Djilba koolang?
Is it worse than if we never met at all?
How can I say it’s worse, can I admit it’s worse?
It is worse…………..
Our silence is full of rage.
Amanda Bell, 2022
Nyoongar Word List
Birak – Nyoongar season (December and January)
Bunuru – Nyoongar season (February and March)
Djeran – Nyoongar season (April And May)
Djilba – Nyoongar season (August and September)
Kambarang – Nyoongar season (October to November)
Kalyakool – always, forever
Koolang – child
Makuru – Noongar (June And July)
Wadjella – white person
Garry Sibosado. Photography by Michael Jalaru Torres
About the Artist
Garry Sibosado is an artist, designer, and jeweller of the Bard People of the west Kimberley.
Sibosado lives and works at Lombadina, a small community 200 kilometres north of Broome.
Garry’s works are contemporary explorations of traditional Bard creation narratives, kinship systems and culture, made from guwan or pearl shell, the same material used by his ancestors in fashioning of cultural objects.
His works have been exhibited widely, including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Cairns Regional Gallery, Wollongong Gallery and Western Australian Museum.
Works for sale
Garry’s Undertow work is available to purchase. Visit our sales page for details.
CURATOR’S REFLECTIONS: GARRY SIBOSADO
Garry Sibosado is an artist, designer, and jeweller of the Bard people of the west Kimberley. Garry’s works are contemporary explorations of traditional Bard creation narratives, kinship systems and culture, made from guwan or pearl shell, the same material used by his ancestors in fashioning of cultural objects.
While Garry doesn’t consider himself a politically motivated artist, the way that Garry works and the pace he takes in creating a work is in many ways a comment on the fast pace of contemporary life and the systems of capitalism that manifest as continued and ongoing development in Western Australia and significant environmental and social impact this has on place and people.
Sibosado lives and works at Lombadina, a small community 200 kilometres north of Broome in the north west. Garry’s life, as with the lives of all Bard saltwater people, has been shaped by seas and oceans that surround the peninsula that Lombadina sits upon. These bodies of water sustain Bard people, physically, culturally, and spiritually – they are home to the totemic creatures that provide food for community but also, like the land, waters are imbued with lore – holding the keys to understanding one’s place in the world.
For Garry, as for all seafaring First Nations people, to understand and navigate the water you must also understand and hold knowledge of the sky – they are inherently entwined and interconnected – tides are, after all, made by the pull of the moon, and stories of our human beginnings are etched into the night sky, witnessed by us and our ancestors alike, across the eons.
‘My art reflects my heritage as a saltwater man from the Bard Country in the Dampier Peninsula of the West Kimberley. Although the sea is a constant inspiration for my designs, for this work I have turned my gaze to the skies – to the ‘ocean in the sky’. The stars that make up the Milky Way is what we call ‘Oongoonorr’.
Many cultural creators came from the ‘Oongoonorr’. Symbols within this work include traditional and contemporary icon designs that represent totems of my people, as well as a glimpse of the multitude of stories that our people transfer from generation to generation about the stars.’
Garry Sibosado, Oongoonorr, 2021, mother of pearl, native ebony, cubic zirconia, powder coated steal. Supported by the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, Artforms and my family. Installation image from John Curtin Gallery. Photography by Robert Frith
CALL & RESPONSE: THE SALWATER SLOW DOWN: GARRY SIBOSADO’S ‘OONGOONORR’ (MILKY WAY), BY EMILIA GALATIS, 2022
The following text was commissioned for Undertow and written following an interview between Garry Sibosado and Emilia Galatis, on January 3rd 2022. Emilia Galatis is an independent curator, author, and arts facilitator with over 15 years of experience working alongside Aboriginal artists and remote art centres in the development and promotion of ambitious creative projects.
“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” ― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
The cyclical nature of time mimics the rhythms of nature; as we reach the limits of capitalism perhaps, we can glimpse the tidal motions of our next aeon, but only if we listen carefully. Amongst the relentless development in the State of Western Australia, reciprocity with our natural world seems unfathomable. If Western thought teaches us anything, it’s that everything is a construct, systems created by man that stratify humans as the undisputed leaders. As the last creations to join the other living beings on the planet, I am not sure when we assumed this unquestionable authority. Country is so loud right now, how will we hear the answers? We are floating in the ocean, the sea of possibility; every full moon signals a larger, more powerful tide, we rise and fall in its wake, surrendering to the possibility of reconstruction and rejuvenation.
Over 270 shimmering pieces of pearl shell and crystal comprise Garry Sibosado’s Oongoonorr, his most elegant comment on the contemporary world to date. His personal reflection on the Milky Way, or the ‘ocean in the sky’, synthesises past, present and future, a comment to us all, and a warning of what is lost when we believe that humans can be separated from the whole. Like a shimmering mirage, Oongoonorr poses the world in its entirety, a spiral motif, with everything cycling in its own motion. Garry’s personal reflection on the interconnectivity of all living things creates a space for reflecting on the insidious speed of corporate development in the state of WA.
What is lost when the spirit of the land is caught up in the speed of development? Oongoonorr gently us asks us to assess our own place in the world.
“Everyone thinks that the world is about humans, it’s not. Did anyone ask the whales if we could shoot them with harpoons? Did anyone ask the lizards if we could clear the land?”
Garry Sibosado is a saltwater Bard man who lives in Lombadina. Lombadina is a small community on the Dampier Peninsula about two hours out of Broome. This is important for many reasons; saltwater people have an affinity with the ocean as master and provider; Garry grew up with his elders and showed a natural talent for pearl shell carving. Once a dirt road, the road up to the Cape is now sealed, seeing more visitors than ever. Reading the ocean and fostering a deep affinity with the sea is Garry’s birth right. For Garry there is no distinction between land and water, there is land under the sea after all. In this way, stories of the sky and the sea are both a science and mythology. Water is a highly politicised space in the Kimberley right now, it is hard to talk about the mythology of water without talking about who wants it.
The ocean is at the forefront of identity for Bard people;
“I was looking at the Milky Way and thinking about the ocean, stories that are in the Milky Way. My people are saltwater people, so this is my perception of the Milky Way”.
Garry describes the Milky Way as the ocean in the sky; using pearl shell that comes from the ocean to create a cyclical comment about this connection. He starts by explaining memories he has as a child, laying under the stars, looking up. These early, and formative moments in time are a metaphor for simpler times. For saltwater people, the ocean is not as mysterious abyss – saltwater people navigate the ocean as expertly as the land, using the sky at night as a compass. Capitalism has destroyed our relationship with the natural environment, however for many First Nations people, artworks like this are a cry for change.
Which brings me to slowing down, the art of slowing down. The work is concerned with the speed at which we all move. When we buy food in packetswe don’t foster an active reciprocity with the natural environment. Each piece of pearl shell in this work is painstakingly cared for and buffed; the natural lustre of each pearl shell exquisitely exposed so that there is no aesthetic hierarchy between the man made and natural elements. The insertion of the ebony brings this point home, that story and science are linked; slowing down allows one to use all senses to perceive the world around them.
“People just need to slow down a bit, listen to the world around you, the ocean, the sky, the land, everything. We are not the only creatures here, it’s not our land to destroy. Before us the land, sea and sky are all connected – we use the sky to navigate the water for hunting, even the moon, the tides are way bigger than normal. We use the moon to hunt at night. Take time to smell the leaves, the ocean, to relax, find the peace, find the balance.”
Most of the time my art is my personal connection with my surroundings and environment – in order to teach others, you must have a strong connection yourself.”
Slowing down implies a holistic approach to life where we see the connections between all living things – do we want balance or destruction? The thirst for greater commerce is at the heart of the Western Australian frontier, since colonisation, the Kimberley has been a site of exploitation and foreign invasion, all in search of economic prosperity.
“I am not an overtly political artist but there is a huge push for new development across the whole of the Kimberley. The spirit of the land is lost through these developments, even the tourism is pushing us to do more and meet the demands of external commerce.”
So, I will leave you with something to ponder, out into the ocean and back again, looking up, with reflections upon the realm of the dead;
“The Milky Way is also the realm of the dead, where all the spirits are. The southern cross for example is the eagle/ hawk, an ancestral being. The bull roarer landed near it when it was thrown into the sky by another being down on earth. We use these stories and names to navigate the sky at night when we are on the ocean. You will say the name of those stars from the story, as a navigational tool. Like we will say, stay on this side of the southern cross, don’t pass that side.”
Photography by Tim Palman
About the Artist
Born 1987, Boorloo, Whadjuk Boodja | Perth, Western Australia
Lives and works Walyalup | Fremantle, Western Australia
@_sambloor
Sam Bloor is a photographer and visual artist from Perth, Western Australia. His practice investigates points of contention within the designation of urban space along
with perceived notions of value and labour.
Bloor has exhibited in a number of group and solo shows both nationally and internationally including, Totem InTribute (2016) in Edinburgh, UK, the Fremantle Biennale (2019) and Rotterdam Photo Festival (2019), NL. Bloor has won multiple awards, including the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award, and is represented in both private and public collections including the Art Gallery of WA.
Works for sale
A selection of Sam’s Undertow works are available to purchase. Visit our sales page for details.
CURATOR’S REFLECTIONS: SAM BLOOR
‘Borders are the scars of history’, Josep Borrell
Sam Bloor’s newly commissioned works presented within the galleries at Fremantle Arts Centre and off-site on the carriages of the Tourist Wheel at Fremantle Esplanade Park examine our coastline and the oceans that surround as site of asylum for those fleeing persecution, but also as site of nationalism and systemic racism.
Bloor’s works in Undertow, like many in his oeuvre, employ highly-considered text provocations that interrogate Australia’s hard-line stance on border protection – which in summary, is a ferocious defence mounted against any enemy of the nation-state to protect the border, to stop the boats at any cost, monetary, or human. Ironically, these policies are in place to protect a British settler colony established on unceded land, stolen from its rightful custodians less than 250 years ago in a series of human rights violations that continue to this day, both onshore and off.
Within the galleries, in a work of the same name, Bloor offers the provocation ‘that sinking feeling’ at a billboard-like scale, almost five metre in height. A single black line which begins at the opposite end of the room travelling from ground to ceiling on the flanking walls, cutting the space diagonally into equal halves, black below and white above. In doing so Bloor renders a horizon line of sorts, contorting the space in a way that leaves us feeling somewhat submerged, and off-kilter.
While simple, the provocation, ‘that sinking feeling’ is layered and complex, especially so when considered from multiple viewpoints, vantagepoints and worldviews. Voyages across oceans are perilous and often result in tragedy and loss of life. The image of a sinking boat, a familiar sight in media journalism, is easily conjured within our minds. That sinking feeling however is one that we have all experienced. It is that moment in time when we are overcome with dread upon realisation of something terrible having occurred. Our heart races, our breath constricts and a pit forms in our stomach. For Bloor, this is a descriptor of his own visceral response to the ways in which human life is disregarded in the protection of a border, an imaginary line on a map that divides people into two categories, those who belong and those who do not, those whose lives have value, and those who are seen only as a threat to be managed.
For Bloor, the provocations within these works required complexity and the capacity to be interpreted and experienced in differing ways, ways which resonate of nuanced human experience but also of opposing views and of political hypocrisy. Platitudes of nationalism like ‘lucky country’ embellish a mirror, which faces off against another featuring the words ‘illegal bodies’. As we stare into these works, our own faces reflected back to us, we are stuck in the tension of opposing politic and ideology, reflections of simultaneous indifference and empathy and the resulting malaise. We find ourselves trapped and reflected within in an abstracted portrait of contemporary Australia.
These provocations, many of which are drawn from news media articles, interviews and government collateral continue beyond the galleries of the arts centre at Fremantle Esplanade Park, even closer to the Indian Ocean, where they are emblazoned on the carriages of the Ferris wheel that reaches almost fifty metres into the sky. Offered in the same monochromatic treatment seen within the galleries upon bright red carriages with tinted grey windows that travel high, these provocations are transformed into warning signs, particularly from the ocean, warning that the final approach to safety and any imaginings of new beginnings will likely result in an unjust and inhumane betrayal. The arrival lounge for those who have risked their lives to travel to Australia by boat, fleeing persecution and violence, has no welcome signs, no targeted advertising. Instead, many of these arrivals are processed and given onward tickets to faraway prisons on islands including Nauru or Christmas Island.
Mindful of the position from which he critiques, Bloor has spent time speaking with those who have sought asylum here in Australia, seeking to understand the nuance of personal opinions and reflections on Australian policies under which people have been administered. In undertaking this engagement and in having honest and sincere conversations, Bloor notes that for some, gratitude to be living in Australia was their primary reflection. For Bloor, this gratitude mirrors his own sentiment on having been born in what we now call Australia, to have access to clean water, shelter, universal healthcare, within a democracy. Bloor shifts between this gratitude and absolute outrage, between hope and despair, as he encounters and creatively critiques the hypocrisy of border policies and their resultant treatment of people in contemporary Australia.
LUCKY COUNTRY – ILLEGAL BODIES – WAVE OF TERROR – ONE STRIKE – YOU’RE OUT – TIPPING POINT – MELTING POT – SUN-SHINE – GRAVE-YARD all rise and fall in the sky above, rolling repeatedly, like waves breaking upon the shore. While the work can be appreciated from the ground, audiences can also purchase a Ferris wheel ticket for an experience transformed by altitude. Stepping into the carriage, a slight wobble underfoot, doors close and off you go up towards the sky. Your body and gaze are faced westwards, the Indian Ocean before you. As you ascend, the vastness of this ocean space is revealed, as too is your own physicality and vulnerability, but more importantly there is a moment of understanding, of plight and peril, which comes from an alternate vantage point, from seeing things through a lens less familiar.
In the here and now our causes, plights, opinions, and concerns are so easily shared, and reshared. Yet somehow there always seems to be a cause more urgent, more time sensitive, needing more attention than others. We hop off one cause to jump on another, like a ride at the show, like a Ferris wheel perhaps. Our steadfast allyship and our most sincere and heartfelt concern can seem somewhat fleeting, short-lived, insincere, or performative. While it is easy and commonplace to critique a generation of keyboard warriors, at the heart of the matter, is it not true that there is just so much for us to be deeply troubled by, so much to fight for and so many struggles to bring light to, most of which have historically been rendered invisible by oppressive mechanisms of power and control?
Glenn Iseger-Pilkington, 2021
Sam Bloor, That Sinking Feeling, 2021, mural sketch. Image courtesy the artist
CALL & RESPONSE: ACESSORY BY SHAY AZZARI
The following text was commissioned for Undertow, as a response to the narratives, themes and ideas in Sam Bloor’s recent works.
If we repeat an affirmation together, surely we are bound to increase the chances of manifestation. If I tell you that we’re equal and you echo it back, then that’s probably what we are. Especially if we make eye contact.
A yellow boat, girt by the thick custard curve of a dripping arrow, glugs across the Operation Sovereign Borders website. The icon might signify a circular voyage but it could as easily be the brandmark for a marine recycling program. The vessel, a silhouette of a long jutting bough with a square cabin positioned back near the stern, is a twin to the famed brushed metal trophy beached atop Scott Morrison’s desk.
‘I Stopped These’ says the boat in black title case.
You couldn’t claim that the proclamation had been applied with care – with no true anchor point for alignment, a curvy boat presents quite the challenge for typesetting. Instead, the text bobs somewhere in the middle, slightly askew. I imagine someone at the shop had to make a captain’s call. They may have been hampered by a limited selection of vinyl typefaces in a narrow range of sizes. Sans-serif was a sensible choice, equal parts modern and measured. A serif would be antiquated in contrast to the reflective alloy.
The most recent Federal Budget allocated over $37 million for the promotion of ‘Australian values, identity and social cohesion.’ These values include respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual; English being a unifying element of Australian society; and a ‘fair go’ that embraces the ideals of compassion for those in need and equality of opportunity for all. “We are in this together” is what we say. And we probably are.
I wonder how often the boat gets dusted. It seems like one of those trinkets that you would pick up every so often, like a signed cricket ball or a favourite bulldog clip. I imagine that a man would like to feel that kind of solid weight in their hands or could enjoy gliding the base across the smooth sea of a glass tabletop every now and again. Would you feel embarrassed if someone came in and caught you cradling the boat?
“Embarrassed of what?”
A comprehensive suite of Printed advertising material created for campaigns designed to dissuade people smuggling is available online thanks to a Freedom of Information request. The collateral serves as a survey of rhetoric, a capsule collection of the things we might shout across the sea. There are combative posters amongst the output with choppy desaturated seas, indelicate comics and many pamphlets with many folds for many languages, each boasting of impenetrable borders.
“NO WAY. YOU WILL NEVER SET FOOT IN AUSTRALIA” says a branded key tag, perhaps for the zip of a suitcase or to identify keys to a shared toilet. I wonder if an inhouse designer handled the load of the creative work or if an agency won a tender. It must feel odd to drag a map of Australia under a red sash in the style of a No glass in the pool sign. It must feel strange to register domains like australia.gov.au/zerochance or /novisa. It must.
Our rigid stance on the shore, and the slew of cautionary collateral we produce, reminds them that a deep ocean stretches between us. But what is it that we are actually saying? Can we be both compassionate and hostile simultaneously? Can we speak confidently about freedom and dignity while continuing with mandatory detention, often for years? Can we continue to talk about fairness and equality? We probably will.
Shay Azzari, 2021
Angela Tiatia. Photography by Kieren Cooney
About the Artist
Angela Tiatia (Samoan/Australian, NSW) is an artist who works across performance, video and photography. Her practice is inflected by her Samoan heritage, and explores themes including gender, climate and colonialism.
In much of her work, Tiatia has used her own body as the subject, creating endurance performances that articulate the dynamics of power on both a personal and macro scale.
More recently, Tiatia has produced multi-channel videos in a documentary register exploring environmental change and its economic effects in the Pacific, as well as highly choreographed group performances engaged with the tropes of popular culture.
Follow Angela on Instagram @angelatiatia
Works for sale
Angela’s Undertow work is available to purchase. Visit our sales page for details.
CURATOR’S REFLECTIONS: ANGELA TIATIA
‘We should not be defined by the smallness of our islands but in the greatness of our oceans. We are the sea; we are the ocean. Oceania is us.’
Prof. ‘Epeli Hau’ofa, Pacific writer and anthropologist (1939-2009)
Aotearoa-born, Sāmoan/Australian artist Angela Tiatia makes works that speak to Pacific identity, the impact of colonialism and the realities of the climate emergency in a global context. Tiatia shifts between performance, installation, and lens-based practice, often employing her body as both subject and medium in place-based endurance performance works.
Tiatia works grapple with race, power and gender and make nuanced critique on history’s influence on contemporary reality. Her works, particularly those which shed light on her own Sāmoan traditions and customs seek to question what is true of Sāmoa, and that which has been acculturated from western ideology throughout the colonial adventure.
Holding On, 2015, a documented performance work exhibited in Undertow, seeks to understand the reality of the climate emergency and sea level rise in the Pacific, the body of water that Tiatia’s own ancestral island home of Sāmoa is situated within. In the creation of this body of work, Tiatia travelled to Tuvalu, a small island nation in the Pacific which sits just metres about sea level.
In this performance, which took place at Funafuti, the main atoll of Tuvalu we bear witness to Tiatia laid upon a concrete slab, her body positioned purposefully in reverse cruciform, water lapping against her as the tide rises at the setting of the sun. The body positioning within the frame of the camera is purposeful, a comment on the faith and hope that so many place in a Christian God, to save their island homes, while science and the ever-rising waterline affirm another, more pressing and imminent reality.
Holding On, 2015, poetically and quietly unpacks the intimate relationship between people and place, between body of person and body of water, between the threat and the threatened. Tiatia weaves these elements which are often considered as separate or opposing, back together physically and emotionally. She does so in a way that signals the deep affection island communities have for the ocean-spaces that envelop their homes, reminding us of the inherent entwinedness these spaces have in the very fabric of identity and belonging.
Glenn Iseger-Pilkington
CALL & RESPONSE: ‘ANGELA TIATIA’ BY MADISON HOBBS AND JAIMEY HAMILTON FARIS
The following text was originally published online for the exhibition ‘Inundation: Art and Climate Change in the Pacific’, which was presented at The Art Gallery, University Of Hawai’i At Mānoa (Honolulu, Hawai’i, USA) in February, 2020.
Angela Tiatia is a New Zealand-born artist of Samoan and Australian heritage who explores contemporary culture, drawing attention to the intersection of representation, gender, race, and neo-colonialism. Tiatia’s recent work has been included in After the Fall, National Museum of Singapore (2017/2018); Personal Structures, 57th Venice Biennial (2017); APT 8, Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia (2016); and Tūrangawaewae: Art and New Zealand, Toi Art, Gallery of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand (2018).
Lick, 2015
Single-channel high-definition video 16:9, color, sound
6:33 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney | Singapore
Holding On, 2015
Single-channel high-definition video 16:9, color, sound
12:12 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney | Singapore
In these two performance videos, Lick and Holding On, Angela Tiatia collaborates with the rising tides of Tuvalu to invoke the power of the ocean and the presence of her Pacific female body. The performances came out of Tiatia’s growing concern about her coastal family home in Sāmoa. After eight years away, she witnessed a dramatic change in the land and sea. During that time the green grass, taro, hibiscus shrubs, abundant breadfruit, mango, guava, and frangipani trees had all disappeared. They had given way to a thick brown sludge coming up to her ankles. This experience led her to research climate change and to visit Tuvalu, a Pacific Island nation with strong historical, political, and economic connections to Sāmoa. The nine islands and atolls that comprise the nation each stand at an average of four and a half meters above sea level.
As Tiatia put it in a recent talk given for the Oceania Rising program at the Australia Museum in March 2018, she wanted to show climate change “not on a global scale but on an intimate one—to glimpse how life is lived in an environment where climate impacts are part of the everyday, rather than dramatic one-off events.” Holding On documents Tiatia at rest on top of a concrete slab as the ocean tide subtly rises and the sun sets. At first, the waves come over the slab periodically and shift her body. Over the course of a few minutes, as the tide rises and more water begins to submerge her legs and arms, it impacts her ability to stay centered on this manmade foundation.
While the performance alludes to Tuvalu’s extreme vulnerability to climate change, with warming, rising seas and eroding coasts, it also takes a much more personal and process-oriented approach than most climate change films featuring Tuvalu. As Tiatia recounts, before her visit she had watched many documentaries, including the well-known The Disappearing of Tuvalu: Trouble In Paradise, 2004, in which the situation is so intensely mediated by tropes of threat and disappearance that she needed to see the situation for herself, and hear people’s stories directly.
Arriving on the main atoll of Funafuti as a Samoan sister, and with the support of Australian Museum, Blacktown Arts Centre, and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Tiatia committed herself to a different kind of filmmaking that would reflect and embody the multiple and often conflicting beliefs about climate change held by Tuvaluans. She filmed the daily cycles of life on the islands and, in the process, asked many islanders how they think they need to respond to climate change. She got a variety of answers. Some were most interested in seeking international representation for climate change as a way to reverse carbon emissions. Others were sceptical of international help and more committed to a view that God would intervene. Reflecting on this conversation, Tiatia decided she needed to do a performance in which she could come to terms with these viewpoints, which in both cases seemed to put Tuvaluan lives in another’s hands, and in a position of sacrifice. Seeking an alternative way to feel and experience that position of embodied connection with the water, she lay on the concrete slab, her arms outstretched to both sides and legs placed together. In this cruciform position she then let the water wash over her. As the tide comes in and a crab comes to greet her, she is simply swayed by its rhythm, at times beginning to hold her head over the oncoming water, but still calm and focused.
Lick delves more into the process of collaboration between the body and the ocean waves. This video, played in slow motion and filmed underwater, begins with Tiatia trying to stand on top of a particular rock on the ocean floor with her arms stretched out in front of her and her head above the water. From below, viewers concentrate on the way she uses her legs and arms to keep balance as each gentle wave rolls past and “licks” her. The waves are not strong enough to wipe her out but instead seem to caress her. At moments, she sweeps her arms around and bends her knees to steady herself, bringing her body back into position. The water glistens with the abundance of light from the sun, and is clear enough to see the details in the ocean floor, fish, and Tiatia’s body. As the video comes to an end, Tiatia lets go of the ocean floor and allows the oncoming wave to pick her up and carry her out of the frame of the camera. Even more than in Holding On, viewers experience waves as supportive and buoyant, and the body as active and full of breath.
As in much of her work, Tiatia aims to show the rhythmic connections of body, identity, and place. Tiatia grew up between New Zealand, Australia and Sāmoa. Experiencing the urban settings of New Zealand and Australia as a Pacific Islander brought into focus the history of colonialism, and its exotification and commodification of Pacific female bodies (Eshraghi). Before becoming an artist Tiatia worked as a model. Her understanding of how the global fashion industry, and the commodity industry in general, employs race and gender stereotypes has called her attention to the biopolitics of power in contemporary representations of Pacific Islanders. This has instilled in her work a desire to confront these depictions with empowered decolonizing images, oftentimes using her own body to exaggerate or denaturalize common performative gestures. In her ongoing Inventory of Gestures, she confronts tropes of commodified poses with her own awkward yet powerful poses. In Reflexivity (2013), she connects the history of displaying Pacific Islanders in human zoos with ongoing commodifying attitudes towards her body.
With the Tuvalu video series, she overlays this history with the consideration of how contemporary environmental representations of “drowning” Pacific Islanders on disappearing islands might also feed into histories of colonizing representation (Farbokto and Lazrus). She counters this sentiment with poses that explore strength and control over her own body in relation to, and in communion with, the elements. Especially in Lick, Tiatia stands and floats with power and certainty. Because the camera is positioned beneath the water, the viewer concentrates on Tiatia’s legs in particular, and on her malu, a tattoo specific to Samoan women. In Tiatia’s view, the value in wearing the malu, and having it play such a central part in celebrating her role in protecting relationships between family, community and environment. If the malu is a reminder to her of her responsibility, it is a reminder to viewers of the power and presence of Pacific Islanders in confronting the issues at hand.
As viewers watch Tiatia’s choreography with the waves, there is a powerful understanding that the ocean does not really pose a threat to her survival. Instead, her concentrated engagement expresses a willingness to experience, understand, and work with the elements and environment. If tidal changes are inevitable, how can the body re-compose gestures and rituals learned from actually inhabiting ocean waters?
Madison Hobbs and Jaimey Hamilton Faris, 2020
Farbotko, Carol, and Heather Lazrus. “The First Climate Refugees? Contesting Global Narratives of Climate Change in Tuvalu.” Global Environmental Change, Pergamon, 24 Dec. 2011.
Fekadu, Sarah et al. “The Sea Is Rising: Visualizing Climate Change in the Pacific Islands.” Meteorologies of Modernity Weather and Climate Discourses in the Anthropocene. Narr Francke Attempto, 2017.
“Niu Pawa: What Climate Activism Looks like in the Pacific.” Pasifika Rising, Sept. 19 ,2019, www.pasifikarising.org/niu-pawa-what-climate-activism-looks-like-in-the-pacific/.
Peters, Joakim, and James Skouge. Coconut Ratz and Kung Fu Cowboys: Tales of a Pacific Islander’s Childhood Book. 2018.
Tiatia, Angela. Speech for Oceania Rising program at the Australia Museum in March 2018. Unpublished.
Eshraghi, Léuli, in conversation with Angela Tiatia and Jasime Te Hira. “Bodies that Matter.” Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, Carla Taunto, eds., PUBLIC 54 Indigenous Art: New Media and the Digital. York University, 2017.
Kabutaulaka, Tarcisius and Katerina Teaiwa.Climate, Coal, Kinship and Security in Asia-Pacific Relations. In Australian Institute of International Affairs. 2019 http://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/climate-coal-kinship-and-security-in-australia-pacific-relations/
Ron Bradfield wearing his artwork In Plain Sight, 2019. Photography by Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle
About the artist
Bard Peoples, Western Australia
Born 1968, Northampton, Nhanda Country, Western Australia
Lives and works Walyalup | Fremantle, Whadjuk Boodja, Western Australia
@ronbjnr
Ron Bradfield is a saltwater man from Bard Country in Broome who grew up in Geraldton. He now calls Whadjuk Boodjar (Perth) his home. As the CYO (Chief Yarning Officer) of Yarns R Us; Ron facilitates cultural conversations across all levels of our communities, helping Australians explore their own personal stories and connection to place.
Ron is also a storyteller and artist, having worked in and around the arts across regional and metropolitan WA for 15 years, often supporting the development of artists to strengthen their creative practices.
Works for sale
A selection of Ron’s Undertow works are available to purchase. Visit our sales page for details.
CURATOR’S REFLECTIONS: RON BRADFIELD
Ron Bradfield is a storyteller and for many years telling stories and spinning yarns has been his primary artistic medium, weaving words and conversations with generosity, humour, charm, and wit to share stories of his life and those of his loved ones. He does this in a way that opens the hearts, minds, and mouths of those in his company – creating space for everyone to listen and to share, but most importantly he holds space for people to feel – to feel joy or sadness and to feel safe in revealing their own stories.
In recent years Ron has explored new modalities of storytelling, working as a visual artist, and creating works which chronicle his own life experiences. This is familiar territory for Ron, having worked alongside artists for many years supporting them to share their unique understandings of the world. For Ron, however, the making process is one of much consideration and reflection and can sometimes be a space of unease as he continues to navigate two worlds, often at odds with each other. Like so many First Nations people, Ron exists in two versions of Australia, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and manoeuvres both simultaneously every day of his life.
Born in Northampton in 1968, Ron was raised in Geraldton, at a challenging time for First Nations people in Australia. This was a time of social and cultural change and while Indigenous Australians were being afforded more rights in society, these changes to policy and national attitude did not result in meaningful change in Ron’s life in the 1970 and 80s.
I took part in a schooling through the 70’s and 80’s that reinforced the continued separation of our peoples in this society. It may not have always done so physically (and in my early years it did) but it continued to do so in such a way, that there was absolutely no doubt in any Aboriginal child’s mind about how much they were worth, to an Australian society.
After leaving school in 1985 and after the crushing realisation that to live in Australia he would need to be someone else, someone palatable and not an Aboriginal man, Ron joined the Royal Australian Navy. For Ron as a Bard man, a saltwater man from the Dampier Peninsula of the west Kimberley, he felt that in donning a revered naval uniform he could be accepted in society, he could be ‘one of its Australian men’. In some ways Ron made a temporary exchange of one saltwater identity for another. As a crewmember of the HMAS Westralia, Ron belonged to a family of men and women from all walks of life, a community that endured hardships and pain together. One incredibly challenging event was an engine room fire on board in 1998, a year after Ron had left the navy. This fire resulted in the loss of four lives and the emotional and physical injury of many crew members. Watching on from a distance, Ron felt despair and helplessness for his shipmates.
HMAS Westralia is where I finally became an acceptable example of this society’s ‘man’. This happened completely at the cost of me becoming my own man. It’s where I went through our collective Westralia family’s saltwater law/lore and in doing so, I’d found myself a new tribe and a new place to be and to belong. This is where I developed life-long bonds with those who kept me safe and alive at sea. This is where we lived our saltwater lives in each other’s smell. As a result, this is where some of my deepest and rawest scars were made.
It has been 25 years since Ron wore the tally band of the HMAS Westralia, but the experiences, good and bad have left him permanently changed. For Ron, these experiences were formative, they allowed him to belong to a community, to have purpose and to connect with saltwater country, albeit through the lens of service. There was, however, a point in time when Ron had to reconnect with family, community and Country, a process that continues to this day.
The ambitious works exhibited in Undertow, including the newly commissioned work A Ship’s Crew (2022) are a record, a kind of manifesto, bringing together and reconciling Ron’s life to date. The works honour those two saltwater families and saltwater stories, paying tribute to ancestors and comrades whose struggles and triumphs have inscribed themselves into his own story, into his being. The works comprising this installation are reverential, honouring symbols and icons from his saltwater worlds with mindful and respectful consideration. Functioning as artwork and personal museum, the works sit in a state of poetic balance rather than competing with each other, a reflection of Ron’s personal sense of resolve, looking back to his past.
‘It feels like that ship’s number is branded on my Liyan (my centre of self) permanently a part of my make-up and constantly reminding me of how I came to become a ‘man’ in this ‘Australian’ society’
Glenn Iseger-Pilkington, 2022
Ron Bradfield, The Making Of Me (install view), 2019. Image courtesy the artist.
CALL & RESPONSE: ‘BARDI MAN’, BY CASS LYNCH
The following text was commissioned for Undertow, as a response to the narratives, themes, and ideas in Ron Bradfield’s recent works. Cass Lynch is a Nyoongar writer and researcher whose works explore deep time, climate change and ancestral knowledge. Find out more about Cass by visiting her website.
Off the coast of Noongar Country, a ship of iron moves in dark waters. It travels north, past the islands that were once hills in wide plains, long ago in the Cold Times. It passes the southern plains where tall white dunes roll down to clear seas, and limestone fingers reach up through sand, glowing in the moonlight. Further north, it moves beyond the bent trees of Geraldton, and passes Kalbarri where coastal sandstone meets the deep Murchison gorges, bands of red and orange, cut by the little blue river winding far below. The ship moves past the sandy spits of Shark Bay, where stingrays sleep amongst the shipwrecks on the ocean floor. It skirts the Norwest Cape, passing wide of the blue waters of Nyingulu; home to turtles, octopus, dolphins and rays. Continuing north, the iron in the ship’s hull sings softly as it passes the great iron heart of the Pilbara, and that ancient shield of ferrous rock rumbles tunelessly in return.
North of the ship, where the air is thicker and the coastline is hugged by mangroves and wattle thickets, the oysters of Bardi Country notice the iron visitor approaching. Here these flat discs of south sea oysters live in clutches on the sea floor, hints of moonlight pearlescence lining their shells as they take deep breaths of water. All the sea moves through oysters at one time or another, and they know the ship of iron is there, the metallic tang in the aqueous medium, that song of salt and alloy metal, with traces of diesel fuel in its wake.
The ship passes by Broome in the south, then Beagle Bay, then Lombadina, travelling up the Dampier Peninsula.
The oysters are not the only kin that have noticed the iron ship approaching. All of Bardi Country has stopped to watch the ship enter their waters. The bats in the mangroves glance toward it, the moths have paused from making spirals in the moonlight, the tree frogs are silent, listening. The shore birds lift their necks from nests, the dugongs line up in the shallows, facing west.
Shhhhhhrrrrrrssssh, frrrrsh. The ship is here.
The wind goes to investigate. It travels across waters which were dry land before the seas rose, not long ago. The sea can swallow people, homes, and histories, but it can also throw things up on the shore. Nothing is ever truly lost.
The wind arrives at the ship and discovers that it’s hatches and windows are all closed for the night. It circles around the bridge, looking in at the human faces lit with the red light emanating from the lamps and monitors. It finds a window ajar on the bridge wing and moves in and around the people staring out into the darkness. One person absent-mindedly flicks red dust off a keyboard; another shoos a moth away. The wind moves through the ship, searching, thinking, moving things around. Shaking a cup with a dried teabag stuck inside. Rattling a brass dog tag hanging from a lamp. Lifting a sock from a bag of dirty laundry.
The wind leaves a layer of material as it searches through the hallways, engine rooms and cabins. A sea eagle feather on a fuel drum. Charcoal in the handbasins. Seaweed pearls and barnacle shells amongst discarded food wrappers.
There’s something familiar here, but the wind can’t quite find it. The iron of the ship is singing a mournful song, but under that, the wind can hear the diesel fuel whispering too, singing softly of a time long ago when dinosaur bodies and decomposing ferns were pushed deep into the earth and became oil.
Pearl shell.
There is pearl light here somewhere. The wind rotates and moves towards the sleeping bodies in the bunks of the berth. Over, around, up, and across, the wind searches the beings lying flat in sleeping bags. A sleepy sigh. A shimmer in the gloom.
Pearl light.
There he is, the one who has been pulling the gaze of saltwater Country, craning the necks of bird, mammal, insect, fish and reptile. A man of this place, this Country. Gleaming with pearl light.
What are you doing out here, Bardi Man?
He is sleeping, and clothed in an unusual garb, dressed in the shades of someone else’s sea, his limbs swimming in a foreign dyed ocean. The wind looks him all over, dropping more pieces of Bardi Country as it does. Bee wrapped in spider web. Sea turtle eggshell. The bones of a fish. Ochre powder. This scatter settles into the stitching of his uniform, and the button indents, and the folds of the pants.
The wind wants to lift him away, but he won’t budge. The limbs move easily enough, the legs, the feet, the arms, the hands, they all rise under the winds’ pull. It’s the chest that is sunk like a stone into the soft bed. The heart is heavy, and the wind is just the wind, and cannot lift it.
The wind leaves the ship and blows back toward land, bringing with it the smell of diesel, disinfectant, cotton, and gunpowder.
Who has the power to sing this man home?
Four dingoes climb the dunes and stand there, looking across the seas, facing the ship. The wind moves through their fur and they recognise pearl shell amongst the scents.
They howl.
They howl,
they howl,
they howl.
The howls travel across the water in snaking spirals, tendrils of song looping toward the ship. The vibrational coils burst through the windows; enter up through the bilge; roll down through the exhaust stack. The howls rattle all through the iron ribs of the ship, vibrating, pulsating. They find the Bardi Man still asleep under a dusting of Country. The howls enter his clothes, wrap around his limbs. They move across his arms, his legs, his face, his chest, his back. They wrap around him like a layer of skin, pressing him, squeezing him. The howling envelops him in layers of memory, language, medicine and spirit. His skin is hidden under camouflage, but under the cotton, hair, fat and muscle; his femurs, vertebrae, tibia, ribs and fibula gleam like pearl shell. Softly, so softly, his Bardi bones howl back.
The coiling songs withdraw and the dingo vibrations move away through the ship; knocking hats off dressers, tipping tools from buckets, and flinging paper out of pigeonholes. They clatter out through the hatches into the night sky over Sea Country, dissipating under the stars. The ship travels on northward. The dingoes breathe deep on the dunes and settle as a group to sleep. In the shallows the oyster shells sigh and close themselves up, hiding their moonlight inside, for now.
Cass Lynch, 2022
About the Artists
Sonja Carmichael. Photography by Stradbroke Island Photography. Image courtesy Quandamooka Yoolooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation
Sonja Carmichael
Born 1958 Meanjin | Brisbane, Queensland
Ngugi Peoples, Quandamooka Country, Queensland
Sonja Carmichael is a Quandamooka woman from Mulgumpin / Moreton Island and Minjerribah / North Stradbroke Island, Queensland. She works specifically in the medium of fibre basketry and woven sculptures, informed by her family’s cultural connections to Quandamooka Country, exploring a range of techniques and materials, including ‘ghostnets’ and fishing lines – that directly respond to concerns about the preservation of the natural environment. Her work is held in collections such as the Queensland Art Gallery, Museum of Brisbane, National Gallery of Victoria, National Museum of Australia, and the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Elisa Jane Carmichael. Photography by Louis Lim. Image courtesy of Onespace Gallery
Elisa Jane Carmichael
Born 1987 Meanjin | Brisbane, Queensland
Ngugi Peoples, Quandamooka Country, Queensland
leeceecarmichael
Quandamooka woman Elisa Jane Carmichael is a multidisciplinary artist who honours her salt-water heritage by incorporating materials collected from Country, embracing traditional techniques, and expressing contemporary adaptations through painting, weaving, and textiles. She comes from a family of artists and curators, and works closely with her female kin to revive, nurture, and preserve cultural knowledge and practice. Elisa is a descendant of the Ngugi people, one of three clans who are the traditional custodians of Quandamooka Country, comprising the waters and lands of Moreton Bay.
Both Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael are represented by Onespace, Meanjin | Brisbane, Queensland
Works for sale
A selection of Sonia and Elisa-Jane’s Undertow works are available to purchase. Visit our sales page for details.
CURATOR’S REFLECTIONS: ELISA JANE AND SONJA CARMICHAEL
The ambitious installation work of mother and daughter team, Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael, Ngugi artists from Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island, Queensland) and Mulgumpin (Moreton Island, Queensland) sits at the heart of Undertow, transforming FAC’s main gallery into an underwater chasm, enveloping and submerging visitors within a vessel of ancestral knowledge as if held in the ocean’s watery embrace.
Presenting their most ambitious installation work to date, comprised of six expansive cyanotype works on cotton and a selection of forms woven in the enduring traditions of Quandamooka women, Dabiyil Bajara, 2021, is a celebration of Quandamooka sea Country. The work is a document of care, of holding Country close, of mutual reciprocity between momentary custodians and the Country they care for – it is a work made about and emerging from mothers and daughters, and more broadly it is a story of life and death.
The work is a map, taking us on a journey of Quandamooka Country, above and below waterlines, from one side of Minjerribah to other, from places rich in sea life that have provided for custodians, to places of healing that have been visited by women since the beginning. The title of the work, Dabiyil Bajara translates to ‘water footprints’, a poetic reflection to the marks we make, and leave, if only for fleeting moments, upon and within vessels of water.
Created during the last few weeks of Elisa Jane’s pregnancy and at the time of the passing of Sonja’s sister, Elisa Jane’s Aunty, the work is a meditation on the cycles of life, on ancestral knowledge and on the legacies of First Nations women, who continue to weave knowledge from the past into hopeful futures, with care, courage, and compassion.
CALL & RESPONSE: ‘DABIYIL BAJARA’, BY FREJA CARMICHAEL WITH FAMILY, SONJA CARMICHAEL AND ELISA JANE ‘LEECEE’ CARMICHAEL, 2021
The following text was commissioned for Undertow, as a response to the narratives, themes and ideas in Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael’s recent works. Freja Carmichael is Sonja’s daughter, and Elisa Jane’s sister, and is an author, curator and artworker.
This is a selected glossary describing language, places, materials, and elements featured in Sonja Carmichael and Elisa Jane ‘Leecee’ Carmichael’s installation: dabiyil bajara. Rather than an alphabetically ordered list, meanings flow between one another.
Quandamooka
Our Country is beautiful Quandamooka, where the ocean currents meet with Moreton Bay. Quandamooka is sand, land and sea country and includes Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), Mulgumpin (Moreton Island) and southern islands and coastal areas adjacent to the Bay. There are three clan groups belonging to Quandamooka: Ngugi, Noonuccal and Goenpul. We are Ngugi people.
Matrilineal
Matrilineal stands for the long line of Ngugi women we descend from. Late mother (to Sonja) and grandmother (to Freja and Leecee), Joan Hendriks inspired us to be strong in our culture and to listen deeply with Country. She often said, “water is the living springs of mother earth.”
Mulgumpin
Mulgumpin is place of sand hills. Our Ancestors lived here prior to onset of colonisation.
Minjerribah
Minjerribah, also Terangeri, is neighbouring sand island to Mulgumpin. Our family home is on Minjerribah and it is where we listen, make, and connect on Country. We gather fibres for weaving; we care for the ocean by collecting the rubbish that washes ashore; and we witness cycles of nature with the changing seasons of flora and land, sky, and marine life.
Goompi
Goompi (Dunwich) is on the bay side of Minjerribah and connects the island to the mainland. The passenger ferries travel between Goompi and Cleveland, weaving their way around smaller islands and across the deep bay waters. The bay is home to plentiful marine life including dugong.
Healing rock
Healing rock, known as Adder Rock on Minjerribah, looks to the ocean and Mulgumpin in the distance. Waves crash around the rock and make pools that become temporal homes to small sea life. Like these ephemeral pools, healing rock has witnessed change in tides and times.
Moongalba
Moongalba (Myora) was a mission established on Minjerribah in late 1800s under the Queensland Aboriginal Protection Association. The missionary activity enforced European values on Quandamooka people and other First Peoples sent to Moongalba, resulting in a controlled life with language and cultural practices forcibly silenced. Traditions such as weaving were interrupted for a period of time, but knowledge was never truly lost.
Ungaire
Ungaire is our special weaving fibre, a reed that grows among the freshwater swamps of Minjerribah. Previous generations used ungaire for weaving gulayi (women’s bag). Over the past decade, Mum (Sonja) has researched historical bags housed in museum collections to regenerate the making techniques of Quandamooka Ancestors.
Talwapin
Talwapin (cotton tree) often grows close to the water’s edge. Past generations used the inner bark of talwapin to create string for making large nets. String-making remains an important practice today, representing a material link between past and present.
Pulan
Pulan (Amity Point) is a place on Minjerribah where the sunsets on the calm waters overlooking the bay. Buwangan (dolphin) often vist the shoreline; their presence evokes memory of place. Previous generations would use their hands, spears and sticks to tap the water’s surface, and call out to buwangan to bring the fish ashore.1 The fish would then be gathered using large nets.
Sea mullet
Sea mullet has sustained people for generations. Mullet’s seasonal migration through Quandamooka sea Country is marked by signs in nature. Past generation learnt that when mirriginpah (sea eagle) was seen flying seaward, this meant it was time to bring fish nets to shoreline and prepare for a big catch.2
Shellfish
Shellfish includes oysters, eugaries and quampies. The abundant varieties of shellfish, alongside mullet and other seafoods have been shared communally across time.
Mulumba
Mulumba (Point Lookout) on Minjerribah is home to rocky headlands and stretches of surf beach that bring in tides of shellfish and other sea gifts of country. On a clear day, turtles, manta rays, sharks, and pods of dolphin are seen swimming through the surf and in the cooler months, Yalingbilla (whale) journeys past the coastline.
Ghost Net
Ghost Net is a plastic fishing net or rope, lost or discarded in deep ocean, that continues to drift on its own, entrapping and killing marine life. This rubbish eventually washes ashore affecting the coastline. Where possible, we collect the marine debris and weave it into forms that represent resilience and cultural connection today.
Cyanotype
Cyanotype is an image making process that creates a deep blueprint through light exposure. In this work, cyanotype is used as a metaphoric expression of the layered meanings and experiences embedded in the sands, lands, waters, and cultural material of Quandamooka. The blue colour of cyanotype echoes the impression of Quandamooka sea country; waters that carry and sustain life and in turn these waters are carried by culture and people.
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1 Christine Peacock, History, life and times of Robert Anderson, Gheebelum, Ngugi, Mulgumpin (South Brisbane, Qld.: Uniikup Productions, 2001), 209.
2 This story of Mirriginpah is told in public artwork by Quandamooka artist Belinda Close, titled Mirriginpah, Cabarita Park, Pulan.
As an island continent flanked by deep waters, the ocean holds a firm place in the Australian psyche as a symbol of freedom, pleasure and awe. But a deeper look by a group of Australian artists reveals our oceanic ties are far more complex than first meets the eye.
Presented in association with Perth Festival, Undertow charts the social and cultural histories of our oceans, exploring their role as places of arrival and departure, pathways to freedom, economic highways, sites of colonial terror and vessels of deep ancestral knowledge.
Angela Tiatia, Holding On (detail), 2015, single-channel high definition, video, 16:9, colour, sound, 12:11 minutes, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney | Singapore © Angela Tiatia. Image courtesy: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.
Glenn Iseger-Pilkington, Fremantle Arts Centre’s Curator Visual Arts, commented, “Undertow is about what sits below, what can’t always be seen, but is always felt. It is about going against the current, about deep reflection upon our worlds and lives and more than anything, it is about not resting comfortably in any truth which is not our own.”
Corresponding with Perth Festival’s 2022 theme of wardan (ocean), the exhibition brings together eight artists with strong personal and familial ties to Australia’s coastline and the oceans that surround us, including Amanda Bell (Yued & Badimia People, WA), Sam Bloor (WA), Ron Bradfield (Bard People, WA), Elisa-Jane Carmichael (Quandamooka People, QLD), Sonja Carmichael (Quandamooka People, QLD), Garry Sibosado (Bard People, WA), Soul Alphabet (WA) and Angela Tiatia (Samoan/Australian, NSW).
Working across varied mediums, including large format cyanotype, glass neon, installation, photography and film, their works plumb the depths of our relationship to the expansive waters that surround us, bringing to the surface tales of hope, betrayal, and transformation.
Ron Bradfield, Off Caps, 2019, installation of RAN service cap with HMAS Westralia tally band, boomerang and red ochremarked pearl shell (Guwan). Image courtesy the artist.
“From the evocative filmic works of Angela Tiatia to the delicate pearl shell installations of Garry Sibosado, the exhibition submerges audiences into a deep ocean chasm of layered stories, offering reflections on identity and family, alongside more universal concerns of migration, dispossession and the exploitation of natural resources,” Glenn Iseger-Pilkington continued.
Quandamooka mother and daughter Sonja and Elisa-Jane Carmichael will present Dabiyil Bajara, a new commission and their most ambitious installation to date which honours the waterways of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) as an enduring source of healing, sustenance and wonder. Translating to ‘water footprint’, the installation comprises six epic-scaled cyanotypes which will be draped from the gallery ceiling, featuring ancient Quandamooka stories, plants and animals.
Extending upon her recent creative exploration, Badimia and Yued artist Amanda Bell will present a new installation which employs sound, glass neon and sculptural form to approach the theme of wardarn (ocean) through a lens of personal and collective trauma, while Angela Tiatia’s poetic filmic work Holding On offers a poignant and timely reminder of the imminent threat of a changing climate upon Pacific island communities, and low-lying island communities globally.
Over 270 shimmering pieces of pearl shell and crystal comprise Garry Sibosado’s Oongoonorr, his most elegant comment on the contemporary world to date. His personal reflection on the Milky Way, or the ‘ocean in the sky’, Oongoonorr creates a space to reflect on the interconnectivity of all living things, the wonders of the natural world and the insidious speed of corporate development in Western Australia.
The work of artist and storyteller Ron Bradfield explores the confluence of two seemingly opposing salt-water experiences – the first of being a Bard from the Kimberley, and the second of being a member of the Australian Navy. This significant body of work documents the interplay of these worlds and Bradfield’s deep affinity with saltwater Country.
Exhibited both on-site at Fremantle Arts Centre and at Fremantle Esplanade, Sam Bloor’s newly commissioned text-based works offer highly considered text provocations and design treatments, to interrogate Australia’s hard-line stance on border protection at a time when our border has never been so ferociously defended.
Soul Alphabet, an organisation committed to amplifying the voices of People of Colour, will present At the Ridges of Our Hands, a photographic series capturing the hair braiding practices of African diaspora living in Boorloo and Walyalup. Travelling across the seas with the movement of people, this important cultural practice is also an arbiter of connection, belonging and community, as revealed in Soul Alphabet’s intimate portraits.
Perth Festival Visual Arts Program Associate Gemma Weston said: “The genius of bringing together such a varied group of responses to the ocean in Undertow is how, in conversation, they remind us of what we have in common as people. It is hard to think about the vastness of the ocean and not to be reminded that we’re part of something much bigger than ourselves. Undertow will be as beautiful as it is rich – and these artists share an understanding of how beauty can help us to confront some difficult truths.”
Undertow opens 6:30pm Friday 4 February and is then open daily from Saturday 5 February to Monday 25 April 2022. A series of accompanying public programs and events will be announced soon, with full details available at fac.org.au.
Undertow is presented in association with Perth Festival.
Media Contact: Rosamund Brennan, rosamundb@fremantle.wa.gov.au, 08 9432 9565
Artwork details: Sonja Carmichael and Elisa-Jane Carmichael, Balgagu gara (come celebrate) (detail), 2020, cyanotype on cotton, 278 x 274cm. Image courtesy of the Artists, Onespace Gallery and the Art Gallery of South Australia. Photography by Grant Hancock
