Torres Strait Islander Prints from Badu Island

These beautiful linocuts reflect the artist’s love of the ocean, the strong cultural traditions and relationships they have with Badu Island through its creatures, the wind, rain, earth, sky, stars and the sun.

‘Reflecting our strong cultural traditions and our beautiful relationships with our world we carefully express our love and dedication to the ocean, to our island and all of its creatures and animals. We show our relationships with the wind, rain, earth, the skies, stars and the sun.

Our life cycle, is the same as the cycle of the world around us.

To see our art is to be delighted from another world, a world alive with myths and stories and ancient tradition, and one that is strong and with a clear and powerful voice.’

© Badu Art Centre

Secret World: Carnivorous plants of the Howard sand sheets

‘Secret World: Carnivorous plants of the Howard sand sheets’ is an art exhibition focusing on the unique Bladderworts that thrive on the Howard Sand Plains near Darwin.

The Howard sand sheets host a number of unique and threatened plant and animal species including rare carnivorous plants (Utricularia species) and the Howard River Toadlet.

In 2015 a group of artists and scientists gathered during peak flowering, near the end of the wet season, to investigate the complex species that flourish through their own ingenuity, yet are vulnerable to outside forces.

Darwin based artists Winsome Jobling, Sarah Pirrie, Jasmine Jan, Karen Mills, and Jacqueline Gribbin joined botanical specialists Dr Greg Leach and Emma Lupin from Greening Australia NT who explained the unique nature of the site, identified plants and lead field trips to key environmental hot spots.

The result is a deeply researched and highly creative artistic response to a rare and delicate environment on Darwin’s doorstep.

View the catalogue PDF

View the collaborative art work

View video with Emma Lupin

View the Education Kit

LIVELY: New Prints from Warmun Arts

Warmun Art Centre and Nomad Art present LIVELY—a new series of etchings by Gija artists produced with Basil Hall Editions.

LIVELY is a term in Kimberley Kriol that describes an energetic way of doing something. It’s a boisterous and confident way of getting into it, getting something happening and getting going, with strong connotations of happiness.

Lena Nyadbi, Mabel Juli, Peggy Patrick, Shirley Purdie and Gordon Barney and Sade Carrington are all artists whose personal characters and artistic practices are always lively. They are lively for art, language and story. They’re lively for flowing rivers, fishing and bush tucker. They’re lively for children, family and camping out under the winter stars. And they’re lively for song, dance and Country. This exuberance for life beams through in their most recent prints.

The Stone Dialogues

The Stone Dialogues are a series of etchings exploring the relationship we have with matter from deep time. Stones bear witness, of their formation, of events, of humans and non-humans tracking across the surface. What can they reveal to us as we caress them in their manifold shapes and sizes? In dialogue with this vibrant material I learn about presence, weight and gravity, edges and shadows, time and porousness, chance, and surprisingly, love. What is it about this material that pulls me to it?

From Mirima National Park in WA to Kunanyi/Mt Wellington in Hobart I explore the rock formations that lie at the edges of towns.   The rocks were once a layer, a mark of an event in time, now broken and reformed. They reveal a history of form and formlessness, a continuous becoming and changing. They have been sea-beds, sand dunes, rock shelters and quarries, revealing multiple histories and possibilities. Stones fold and crack, revealing the pressures that push up from below whilst water ceaselessly erodes, finding pathways in irregularities. Touching a stone, be it a boulder or a pebble, brings into the present moment deep time, slowing us down and revealing our momentary passage on the track.

Jan Hogan 2015

Tropical Louvres – Anne McMaster

The images portrayed in this exhibition are inspired by the natural habitats of the Tiwi Islands including coastal mangroves and coral. Other elements that influence Anne McMaster’s art are the changing nature of the seasons, the beautiful Island light and the contemporary Island culture of AFL football.

This body of work is the result of a Masters of Fine Art research through Monash University, carried out while living on Melville Island. McMasters exploration of the printmaking methodology has culminated with etched and stencilled images symbolising this environment as seen through the louvred windows of her studio.

Louvres and Floorboards – Bobbie Ruben

Digital designs on linen from Speargrass Textiles

Bobbie Ruben captures the essence of Darwin’s elevated, tropical homes where intelligent design is paired with the beauty of horizontal, vertical and diagonal line. Delivering simple functionality with the elegance of frosted 1960’s louvres ensure these homes are a joy to live in. Their beauty and meaning are engrained in her textiles.

Bobbie Ruben is a practicing printmaker, lecturer and textile designer who consults, teaches and collaborates with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and students in the development of textile designs, and limited edition prints on paper. She has a strong interest in the development and success of many remote textile operations in the Northern Territory and Far North Queensland and has worked with artists on high profile textile commissions, exhibitions and performances, which have achieved national and international recognition. Speargrass Textiles, formed in 2001, incorporates her distinctive textile designs.

For more information contact: gallery@nomadart.com.au

Children’s Ground: New prints by artists of Kakadu

From Jabiru in the heart of Kakadu National Park, this exhibition of lino-cuts, collographs, dry points and etchings features artists with cultural connections to the region spanning tens of thousands of years. The art work is based on rock art traditions and cultural and natural imagery.

Printmaking workshops have been facilitated in Kakadu by the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation since 2011. The aim of these workshops is for the skills learnt to stay within the community and enrich artistic practice. The print making is now being facilitated through Children’s Ground and is inclusive of artists from Djirrbiyuk, Madjinbardi and Manabadduma in Kakadu. Children’s Ground is an organisation that responds to the cultural, social and economic needs of the communities.

For more information contact: gallery@nomadart.com.au

Revolution: New work celebrating 20 years of printmaking at Yirrkala Print Space

In May 1995 a small revolution happened in far eastern Arnhem Land. The Yolngu artists of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka rose up and ‘seized the means of production’. Remote Indigenous printmakers began working on their own press to create limited edition fine art works on paper. Thus they began the Yirrkala Print Space.

And now, twenty years later, the wheel of that etching press has turned full circle. Yirrkala Print Space is one of the country’s most highly respected independent print studios. Yolngu printmakers have editioned over 800 etchings, screenprints, woodblocks, linocuts and collagraphs created by 134 Yolngu artists. The space has never been idle over that twenty years and has at all times been staffed by Yolngu printmakers who have passed on their knowledge to new generations.

This exhibition of 20 new etchings honours the imagery and heritage of the artists. The works reflect the traditions and culture of their people yet is brimming with innovation and originality. Over 20 years the artists of Yirrkala Print Space have revolutionised the way art is made and the way knowledge is shared with the public. Their philosophy is highly democratic and the prints highly accessible,  transforming art into new realms and creating a revolution in every sense.

Manme Mayh: Gardens of the Stone Country III

Manme Mayh: Gardens of the Stone Country III explores the links between Indigenous cultural heritage, environment and aesthetic traditions of artists from the Stone Country of western Arnhem Land through food and plants (manme) and animals (mayh).

The artists in this exhibition represent a small and unique group of painters who are actively maintaining the distinctive practise associated with the traditions of rock art painting in western Arnhem Land and the knowledge it purveys. The artists are Allan Nadjamerrek, Lorraine Kabbindi White, Gavin Namarnyilk, Freddie Nadjawulu Nadjamerrek, Graham Badari and Don Namundja.

The Stone Country of western Arnhem Land also known as the plateau country adjoins Kakadu National Park. The rocky outcrops of the escarpment dominate the landscape while adjacent flood plains, permanent rivers and billabongs are abundant with life of countless species of animals and plants.

Manme Mayh: Gardens of the Stone Country III focuses on the native plants and animals integral to the culture and traditions of the Kunwinjku speaking people and the spirit figures associated with them. The exhibition highlights cultural associations the Kunwinjku people have with species that include the emu, fruit bats, the kangaroo, black wallaroo, Oenpelli python, water lilies, crocodiles, turtles, fishes, yams, and other plants that provide both food and tools.

View the Catalogue

The Secret Lives of Plants and Insects

In this exhibition John Wolseley explores complex life forces and leads the viewer into the umwelt or life world of plants and insects. The Secret Lives of Plants and Insects includes watercolours, etchings, wood blocks and nature prints that have been created over 20 years and thousands of kilometres.

The exhibition features two series of monoprints on mulberry and gampi paper in which Wolseley has taken prints of desert plants and the tracks of beetle larvae as they bore through the wood under the bark of trees. Wolseley uses an ancient Italian technique to print the complex tracks and journeys directly from the subjects, so revealing a whole life story. The works are influenced by Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexkull’s theory that all life forms experience their umwelten or environments differently.

In the first series of monoprints we are led into the umwelt of the larvae of Longicorn beetles. The second series shows plants found in the desert dunes near Coward Springs in the southern reaches of the Simpson Desert. One of these, a Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) has seeds, which were an important food source for the Arrernte people. At first the plants are a bright green and then turn red, throw out clouds of tiny black seeds and finally wither into blackness.

The beetle and plant prints in this exhibition join with other images to take us on a journey through central and northern Australia and across to the Indonesian archipelago, as they celebrate the beauty and diversity of the secret world of plants and insects.

Plants and animals experience their own subjective worlds with different perceptual frameworks than ours. A swallow living on the wing and on the wind has its own particular ‘life world’. As has the beetle, which I found just hatched on a desert poplar among sand hills. By printing directly from the life histories which the beetle larvae have engraved under the bark, (with their own autobiographies as it were), I have tried to get nearer to the being of these mysterious creatures. Or I hope at least to limit the extent to which I impose my own structures on the insect in an anthropomorphic way. I once put my ear to the trunk of a tree and heard the sound of a witchetty grub gnawing its passage under the bark. So with these prints I am still learning from beetles. Or as Matsuo Basho put it  – ‘Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.’

John Wolseley 2015

The artist acknowledges the brilliant and skilled assistance of Kaitlyn Gibson and Cassandra Gill in the printing of the beetle biographies.

Not Waving…..Drowning

In this exhibition Merran Sierakowski continues to explore the notion of venomous sea creatures as a metaphor for the increasing ugliness displayed by our nation in the treatment of marginalised members of society. Not waving, but drowning in self-interest and the poison of intolerance. The creatures represent old prejudices and fears, much as images of monsters were depicted on medieval maps of imagined lands.

‘We Australians strangely maintain our belief in our manufactured national character of acceptance and a ‘fair go for all’ through increasingly nationalistic displays of flag waving and national pride. However this attitude is only an outward display. We are allowing ourselves to become mean spirited and intolerant. We are not waving and welcoming. We are not helping each other. We are drowning in self interest’.

Merran Sierakowski 2015

View the Online Gallery

Kieren Karritpul: Woven Lines

Woven Lines is the second solo exhibition by this exciting young Northern Territory artist. At the age of 21 Kieren Karritpul is a highly talented emerging painter and designer from Merrepen Arts at Nauiyu Community on the Daly River.

In Woven Lines Karritpul continues to explore the minutiae of his line and pattern- making with new complex compositional arrangements and bold synchronisations of colour.

Karritpul paints subjects associated with the traditional culture and knowledge of his clan. In this exhibition he extends his exploration of the woven line in painting and fabric design. Karritpul grew up watching his mother and grandmother collecting, dyeing and weaving pandanus and sand palm (merrepen) fibre. As they worked he would listen to the stories they told about the traditional culture and heritage of his people.

As a young contemporary artist Karritpul has transformed his knowledge of weaving and dying into intricate and colourful paintings. His images incorporate the pattern of pandanus bundles, woven baskets, coolamon and fish traps, while the colours of his paintings emulate rich and beautiful natural fibre dyes. The works not only pay homage to Karritpul’s culture and heritage, but extend boundaries of contemporary visual expression.

In 2014 Karritpul won the Youth Award for his screenprint on linen titled Yerrgi, at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. In 2015 Karritpul was a finalist for the Northern Territory Young Achiever Awards, Charles Darwin University Arts Award.

Read the catalogue essay by Maurice O’Riordan

Everybody’s Prints – New Work from Mangkaja Arts

Nomad Art and Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency are proud to present a new body of prints created in partnership with Basil Hall Editions in 2014. These new etchings and screen prints represent traditional connections Mangkaja artists have to the Kimberley region.

Typically diverse in style, the etchings are reminiscent of the seminal drypoint prints created by Mangkaja artists at Northern Editions with Basil and Leon Stainer during the Kaltja/Business Conference in 1996. Artworks depict important sites and natural resources including waterholes and many varieties of plant food.

Mangkaja artists began printmaking in 1994 with Martin King from the Australian Print Workshop (APW) in Melbourne. The artists produced a wide variety of images in the first workshop at Mangkaja Arts and have sustained a strong printmaking practice since, resulting in works being acquired by various public and private collections, including the British Museum and the National Gallery of Victoria.

EARTHworks

Earthworks is a continuation of Winsome Jobling’s 2014 exhibition titled Earth. It is a reflection upon the natural changes and movement of the Earth in tandem with human exploitation of natural resources. In Earthworks Jobling moves deeper into the geological transformation of the earth and how this influences our sense of identity, shaping our interactions with the environment. The works consist of handmade paper made from plant materials with earth pigments.

All around us invisible matter forms the visible. Whirling and colliding atoms, electrons, quarks and magnetic fields are the building blocks of everything.

All known things are made up of quarks and electrons tied together by strong magnetic fields.

Nothing is still.

The Earth’s tectonic plates move under our feet about as fast as our hair grows.

Earthworks continue throughout geologic time, constantly moving and changing.

Things collide, always cause and effect, the ceaseless gradual erosion or cataclysmic transformation.

The influence of the natural world on our sense of identity and place has changed and a more active engagement and greater understanding would challenge the complacency of familiarity where we now see the natural world as exploitable object.

By respecting the natural world our interactions might be tempered by a deeper empathy.

Materials

The earth pigments I use are sourced from all over the Northern Territory; red sand from Titjikala, grey mud from Cahills Crossing, purple/brown from an abandoned mine near Tennant Creek. All are the worn down remnants of ancient geology.  The charcoal is from bushfires, the ‘bones’ of bushland.

Abaca is a fibre from the non-fruiting banana Musa textilis and is imported from the Philippines part processed, ready to be beaten and formed into paper.

The plant fibre papers using Phalsa (Grewiaasiatica), Stringybark (Eucalyptus tetradonta) and Kapok (Cochlospermumfraseri) are locally sourced and processed.

Winsome Jobling 2015

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View the Catalogue >

Cultural Ground: New prints from Jilamara Arts and Crafts

Nomad Art presents an exquisite collection of new etchings, linocuts and works on paper from Jilamara Arts and Crafts. Inspired by the rich cultural heritage and the island environment, the artworks represent the stories and customs of the Tiwi people.

The prints were produced in collaboration with Martin King from the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne and feature Raelene Kerinauia, Janice Murray, Pedro Wonaeamirri, Timothy Cook, Conrad Tipungwuti, Brian Farmer Illortaminii and Nicholas Mario as well as younger artists.

Australian Print Workshop (APW) has an ongoing relationship with Jilamara Arts & Crafts, which began in 1995. Since then APW has undertaken several return trips to the Island. These visits have been complemented by visits to the workshop in Melbourne by several of the Tiwi artists.

Jilamara Arts & Crafts was first established in 1989 as an adult education centre focusing on fabric printing. Today artists work from a palette of natural ochres to produce paintings on linen, canvas, paper and bark. Also renowned for sculptural works the tradition of carving has continued through the art centre.

Artists draw inspiration from ceremony, body paint (yirrinkiripwoja) and scarification designs (minga), clan totems and the Tiwi creation story. Designs passed on by family are also an inspiration to artists developing their own particular style – their own jilamara.

Jilamara Arts & Crafts is located at Milikapiti (Snake Bay) on Melville Island. The Tiwi word ‘Jilamara’, which roughly translates to ‘design’ refers to the intricate ochre patterning traditionally applied to the bodies of dancers and the surface of carved poles during the Pukumani funeral ceremony.

Prints produced by Jilamara artists have been acquired for major public collections including: the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria.