Chatter

View the Catalogue

View works on the online gallery

These works are part of Winsome Jobling’s 2018 series of works in paper entitled Chatter. The works are made using handmade papers, drypoint prints and stitching. During the paper making process watermarks, poured pulps and stencilled earth pigments and copy toner are added. Paper fibres include; gamba grass, spear grass, stringy bark, native kapok, devils ivy, abaca and kozo.

Artist’s statement

Six hectares of bushland at Berrimah that I visit lies between Charles Darwin National Park and the Darwin Speedway and is a microcosm of the whole Top End landscape. The savannah forest slides into mangrove on one side and into a low wet pandanus swamp on the other. There are magical places; a small rocky escarpment, a small bowl-shaped valley – cool and quiet and a circle of cycads on a little hill.

For the past 15 years it has been a place to think, research and to collect dyes pigments and plant fibres. It is a place to re-seed and regenerate, but also despair as the invasive weed Gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus) extends further or another fridge or pile of building material is dumped.

This remnant of bushland has colonies of Sand Palm (Livistona humilis) and age-old cycads that grow under a canopy of mainly Stringy Bark trees (Eucalyptus tetrodonta). They hustle together in groups or colonies like families, from first born to elders – strength in numbers!

Anchored in ancient, lateritic and nutrient poor soils both species have spindly, scaly trunks, tough water conserving leaves, and scratchy prickly souls.

The Northern Territory Threatened Species Network lists Cycas armsrtongii as vulnerable in the Top End as the few remaining colonies are in conservation reserves and threatened by the hot and high fires of introduced Gamba and Mission Grass (Cenchrus spp.).

By respecting the natural world with a greater empathy, our interactions might be tempered by a deeper understanding rather than viewing the world as an exploitable object.

The fibres I use to make paper are mainly sourced locally from both native and exotic plants. The Chatter papers are primarily made from local natives; Spear Grass (Sorghum intrans), Stringy Bark, Banyan (Ficus virens), Kapok (Cochlospermum fraseri) and the introduced Gamba Grass. I have also used Abaca (Musa textilis) and Devils Ivy (Epipremnum aureum).

The earth pigments I use are sourced from all over the Northern Territory. All are the worn-down grains from ancient geology. The charcoal is from bushfires, the ‘bones’ of bushland.

My work is both a collaboration with the natural world and a haptic response to our impact on it. My ideas, imagery and materials search for the internal energy and rhythms of the landscape of the Top End.

Winsome Jobling 2018 (Extract from Chatter catalogue essay)

Yirrkala Print Space 2018

Yirrkala Print Space is one of the Australia’s premier print studios specialising in limited edition works on paper produced on their own press. The studio continues to expand its collaborations with master printmakers from across Australia and around the world to facilitate new works and continue the development of techniques and experimentation across the generations of Yolngu printmakers. Printmaking techniques including Japanese woodblock, etching, linocut, screenprints and collagraphs have been learnt, absorbed and applied, combining traditional designs and knowledge to create new artworks.

While these Yolngu artists are respectful of the discipline of miny’tji (sacred design), the nature of the printmaking process has provided artistic freedom of expression; enabling them to experiment with colour, imagery, concepts and design without compromising their spiritual identity. The art of Yirrkala Print Space is being collected and exhibited by galleries around Australia.

Tidal Zone – Tiwi Islands

My recent work is a response to living in a remote Indigenous community of Pickataramoor, on the Tiwi Islands in tropical Northern Australia. This remote location combines the challenges of conceptualising and creating art in relative isolation, while drawing inspiration from the unique geography of the landscape of my daily life.

The rectangle paper panels are a direct reference to the louvered windows that I gaze through into the Tiwi landscape from my studio and home. Typical of Northern Territory Top-end architecture, these panels act as a vent which gives me a wider sense of the elements outside. Gentle breezes pass through and sounds and scents permeate inside, highlighting the seasons and my location.

The arrangement of etchings shows motifs and linear detail of elements of the geography of Melville Island. Images have been created by etching through pitted and washy bitumen exposed to heavy monsoon rain and left to the elements, forming washy textures. Mangrove sprigs from the coast have been used as stencils between aluminium plates and the paper in the printmaking process.

It is at the periphery of the island that I find most fascinating, acting metaphorically as a barrier or boundary line for contact with family; emphasising the remoteness of my location. It is within this context that the louvres are used, highlighting a zone between two spaces – defining my creative realm.

Anne McMaster

Then and Now – images of the Gulf

The word ”waralungku’ (pronounced Wharr Ral Loonghu) represents all of the language groups of the Borroloola Region and is the place name for the Burketown crossing on the McArthur River. The crossing is on the main road just outside of Borroloola.

Waralungku is also associated with the Hill Kangaroo dreaming and an imprint of its feet, tail and hind quarters are located at this site.

Borroloola is a remote community on the McArthur River in the Northern Territory of Australia 30 miles upstream from the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is set in a arresting landscape of rocky hills, cattle-grazed scrub, billabongs, and wide horizons.

Waralungku artists continue to produce exciting contemporary art. They have a unique voice and style. Borroloola artists depict both the life and the history of the community, as well as the distinctive beauty of the surrounding landscape, flora and fauna. The images are layered with a sense of past histories and continuing connections.

East Kimberley Focus

East Kimberley Focus is the first of our series of online presentations. Each month we will delve into the Nomad collections to uncover hidden gems, profile selected artists and present new work. The idea is to reflect on the extraordinary creative output by Aboriginal artists and printmakers over the last two decades.

This month we are focusing on two Kimberley Art Centres, Warmun Arts and Waringarri Arts from the east Kimberley Ranges. Aboriginal artists in the Kimberly have been making etchings, screen prints and lithographs since the 1990s. The collection includes great artists such as Queenie McKenzie, Betty Carrington, Mabel Juli, Lena Nyadbi, Rammey Ramsey, Rusty Peters, Gabriel Nodea, Mignonette Jamin, Billy Thomas and Paddy Carlton to name a few.

Since its inception in 1998, Warmun Art Centre has been one of remote Australia’s most significant cultural institutions. Owned and governed by Gija people, the centre was established by founding members of the contemporary painting movement in Warmun such as Queenie McKenzie, Lena Nyadbi, Betty Carrington and others. The elders recognised and responded to the need for a community owned and controlled centre through which they could support, maintain and promote Gija art, belief, language and culture.

Established 20 years earlier in the late 1970’s, in the heart of Miriwoong country at Kununurra, Waringarri artists also convey the importance of their country and culture through art. Miriwoong land extends from the Northern Territory border to Kununurra, Lake Argyle, Keep River and the Ord River in the east Kimberley.

A range of printmakers from studios such as Red Hand Prints, Northern Editions, Basil Hall Editions and Australian Print Workshop have worked in collaboration with Miriwoong and Gija artists to produce stunning and ground breaking contemporary art prints. We are pleased to present a small selection of these works from the past & present.

View works by Warmun artists on the online gallery

Darwin Dogs by Winsome Jobling and Merran Sierakowski

Darwin Dogs are exposed for what they are…yappy, snappy half crazed dogmatists, crooked as a dog’s hind leg, lurking with intent behind the wire in Darwin burbs.

Darwin artists Winsome Jobling and (onetime postie) Merran Sierakowski have decided that things are getting out of hound, so they have waded fearlessly into the dog eat dog world, with a dog’s breakfast of a show at Nomad Art this month.

The artists are dog tired at being ruffed up and plan to bite back with this canine dishplay. It may be a bit ruff around the edges and a mastiff waste of time, but it is the leashed they could do. So don’t bite the hand that feeds you, at the very leashed you mutt as well get along to Darwin Dogs. After all every dog has its day, barking dogs seldom bite and it is our last little show at Nomad Art Gallery in Parap.

View works by Merran Sierakowski on the online gallery

View works Winsome Jobling on the online gallery

Full Circle: Journeys of an Artist

By Jörg Schmeisser

Jörg Schmeisser’s distinguished printmaking career was informed by a restless curiosity of the visual world. From the beginning, he was inspired by travel, his imagination fired by regular experiences of the unfamiliar and unknown.

This online exhibition celebrates work produced during travels, residencies and fellowships to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Venice, Hangzhou in China, Ladakh in northern India and Antarctica

‘Schmeisser’s keen observation of his surroundings is revealed in the extraordinary rendering of detail, often overlaid by gestural lines and script.  His works also feature abstracted motifs that symbolically evoke the place in which they were witnessed.’ Beaver Galleries

Jörg Schmeisser held over 200 exhibitions, both in Australia and overseas, after he began his tertiary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany.  His work is represented in many of the world’s most notable collections including the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Staatliche Sammlungen Dresden, Germany, Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne, Germany and the National Gallery of America.  In Australia, his work is held in all of the major state galleries as well as the National Gallery of Australia.

Jörg Schmeisser first visited Arnhem Land in 1976. As part of the journey he facilitated some of the first etchings to be made with Indigenous artists of the region. He again visited the Top End in 2009 as part of the Nomad Art Djalkiri project. The outcomes are timeless and beautiful images of unique landscapes.

Jörg Schmeisser died in June 2012.

‘Dear Gilbert,…. ‘ (Song for the Ichthyologist) by Jacqueline Gribbin

This is a continuation of a body of work by Darwin Printmaker Jacqueline Gribbin in which the artist has revived a collection of relief blocks created from scientific drawings by Gilbert Percy Whitley (Ichthyologist and Curator of Fishes, Australian Museum, 1922-1964). The blocks served as a means to print illustrations for Whitley’s many published papers, journals and books.

Through a series of prints, which incorporate the blocks, Gribbin has connected with Whitley’s cheeky humour and passion for all things fishes. The prints are a melding of Gribbin’s created marine environments with Whitley’s scientific work.

Recently researchers have expressed concern that some of the species depicted in Whitley’s blocks could be under threat due to habitat degradation and climate change, providing new perspective on Whitley’s work.

Relief printing blocks courtesy of the Australian Museum.

View the Dear Gilbert catalogue

Ngani pek che durrmu – Our group of artists working together

In late 2017, the artists of Durrmu Arts at Peppimenarti in the Northern Territory collaborated with Jocelyn Tribe and Basil Hall to create this magnificent series of silkscreen prints.

Established artists such as Regina Wilson and Kathleen Korda, lead a small group of emerging artists through the process of printmaking and the exploration of tradition patterns, designs and basket stitch techniques.

Bark Paintings and Larrakitj from Yirrkala

Located at Yirrkala in north-East Arnhem Land, Buku Larrnggay Mulka has maintained its status as a leader in contemporary art for decades. Dating back beyond the Bark Petition, Yirrkala Church Panels and Saltwater Collection, Yirrkala artists continue an artistic legacy that extends over tens of thousands of years. More recently artists have embraced the classical beauty of bark painting alongside stylistic and personal innovations.

Historically, Yolngu (Aboriginal people) passed on their creation stories and knowledge of country, through song, dance, ceremony and art. Clan designs called miny’tji represent the acts of the Wangarr (ancestral beings) and the laws they created. These designs are painted onto objects such as the larrakitj (ceremonial hollow log) and bark panels, using the fine hairbrush, marwat. Through the act of reproducing miny’tji, Yolngu are linked to their ancestors and reaffirm their identity and association with country.

 Miny’tji designs are often geometric in style incorporating diamonds, triangles and lines. Each design relates to a story associated with particular clan groups and their Ancestral beings. Clan designs are part of the intellectual property rights of the clan and only those people with the rights to certain designs are allowed to paint them. In this way they can be seen as title deeds to country.

Ref: Balnhndhurr – A Lasting Impression – An Artback NT Touring Exhibition 2017-2019, Education Kit, Teachers Notes

https://artbacknt.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/Balnhdhurr-teachers-notes.pdf

Instability

2016 was an unusually cloudy and wet dry season. I began documenting the cloudy days from June to August by taking photographs and I did the same last year. The 2017 dry season was the warmest on record.

These drawings are made using recycled photocopy toner.

The composition of photocopy toner is generally 60% heat-sensitive micro-plastic particles and the rest is iron oxide and pigment.

Clouds; beautiful, cottony, floating arrangements of water molecules. Cumulus clouds are the product of heat and convective air-mass instability that grow upward to form rain.

Water vapour has a strong effect on weather and climate. As the planet gets warmer, more water evaporates from the earth’s surface and becomes vapour in the atmosphere. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, so more water vapour leads to even more warming. A hotter atmosphere is able to take up and retain more moisture – every degree of warming results in and average 1% increase in rainfall.

We are turning the natural world against itself and us!

As Tim Flannery says; ‘We are now the weather makers.’

The human impact on the natural world is central to my work and my materials always carry an intrinsic message……………………….an armature for ideas.

Winsome Jobling 2018

Tokapuwi – Big Mob of Birds

Tiwi Island artist, Janice Murray is renowned for her depictions of birdlife that inhabit the Tiwi Islands. This exhibition of etchings features her exceptional graphic interpretations of traditional cultural motifs, birds and ceremonial design. Birds include Pinjoma Jilamarini – Barn Owl, Muma – Torres Strait Pigeon, Kawukawunga – Female Bush Turkey, Jongijongini – Eastern Reef Egret and Wayayi – Bush Curlew.

In 2017 Janice Murray was awarded an Australian Print Workshop Collie Print Trust Fellowship to work in collaboration with printers Martin King and Simon White to produce ten new large format etchings.