This land after – this land before

Angus Cameron, Winsome Jobling, Talitha Kennedy and selected works from

Nomad Art Collections

This land after – this land before is a meeting place for the work of three artists who question our cultural ability to live within the natural environment. The exhibition offers a sensual and intellectual engagement with nature on both philosophical and aesthetic grounds.

Euroa Butter Factory, Victoria

Showing 5th – 6th December 2020

Angus Cameron makes prints and impressions on paper that reflect the environment where he lives. His works embody aesthetics found in nature echoing forms and patterns that make up the micro and macro world of plants and place. On a higher level the work questions our cultural and political histories and management of the land.

Winsome Jobling has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1981. Her printed works on paper, paper installations and sculptural forms extend traditional notions of papermaking. Her art merges contrasting elements of texture, translucence, fragility and strength. Her practice is intrinsically linked to the environment on intellectual and physical levels.

Talitha Kennedy’s work embodies an aesthetic of fecundity where creative forces ocellate between the growth and decay. Her soft leather sculptures fuse notions of plant, body, animal and land. Her hand stitched organic forms reflect our fraught relationship with the natural world, where we camouflage our contemporary selves from the cycle of death, decay and renewal.

Inner Worlds II

Marlene Rabuntja, Marjorie Keighran,
Stewart Hoosan, Dion Beasley and Ray James Tjangala

This month we continue to explore the imaginative world of artists who are celebrated for their distinctive personal styles. These works take us on a visual journey through memories and observations of people who live across Australia. They draw us into a world of experiences and knowledge through imagery of animals, plants and places that embody remote life. We hope you enjoy Inner Worlds ll.

Marlene Rubuntja

Marlene draws inspiration from what she sees around her at Yarrenyty Arltere Town Camp in Alice Springs. She is interested in telling proudly the stories of her ancestors as well as her husband’s country atKalkarindji. These are the delicate twigs that fall from the desert trees.

Marjorie Keighran

Marjorie is a senior Garrwa woman, whose Dreaming is Kananganja (Emu). Marjorie was born at Westmoreland Station on the NT and Queensland border. She grew up at Wollogorang station and Red Bank Mine, south-east of Borroloola, where she spent her days hunting and gathering bush tucker. Many of Marjorie’s paintings contain images of nanny goats as she spent many of her teenage days on the station at Robinson River herding and looking after them: “We’d look after them and take them down to the water and take them back up again”.

Stewart Hoosan

Stewart Hoosan depicts life and the history of the people around Borroloola, a remote community on the McArthur River in the Northern Territory, set in an arresting landscape of rocky hills, cattle-grazed scrub, billabongs, and wide horizons. Hoosan’s images are layered with a sense of past histories and continuing connections set amongst the distinctive beauty of the surrounding landscape, flora and fauna.

Dion Beasley

Being profoundly deaf Dion has experienced many challenges throughout his life but has developed a great passion for drawing, which has served as a means of communication with others. Dion’s delightful depiction of dogs form the basis of the majority of his drawings. Dion’s personal expression focuses on the camp dogs that are central to the life of Aboriginal communities, with its own dramas, tensions and energies.

Ray James Tjangala

Tjangala’s print is part of a suite of etchings by Papunya Tula artists which demonstrates the strength of each artist as they successfully translate their Tjukurrpa to the medium of etching. Tjangala’s image relates to the soakage water site Yunala, west of Kiwirrkura community in Western Australia. In ancestral times a large group of Tingari Men camped at this site before continuing their travels further east to Pinari, north-west of Kintore community. While at Yunala they gathered the edible roots of the bush banana or silky pear vine, (Marsdenia australis), also known as yunala, which is plentiful in the region. The designs in the etching represent body paint worn during ceremonies relating to Yunala.

View works online:

Marlene Rabuntja

Marjorie Keighran

Stewart Hoosan

Dion Beasley

Ray James Tjangala

Inner Worlds

Dulcie Sharpe, Monique Auricchio, 

Malaluba Gumana (dec), John Wolseley

This month we are looking into the imaginative world of the artist. Inner Worlds presents artists who are celebrated for their distinctive personal styles. These works take us on a journey through memories and observations to tell us stories of animals, places and emblematic characters. They draw us into a world observed – with the thoughts, humour, fear and joy that embody life. We hope you enjoy Inner Worlds.

Dulcie Sharpe was born at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. The inspiration for her art comes from animals and bush tucker and features powerful images of the artists’ Arrernte homelands west of Alice Springs.

Monique Auricchio is a New South Wales based printmaker who explores the menacing relationships between predator and prey in the animal kingdom. Her work contains whimsical and theatrical elements of animals infused with human sensibility and evokes the fragile and peculiar pecking order of the human and animal condition.

Malaluba Gumana (dec) was an NT artist who lived at Gangan, NE Arnhem Land. Malaluba mainly painted her mother’s Gålpu clan designs of dhatam (waterlilly), djari (ripples and rainbows), djayku (filesnake) and wititj (olive python). Her imagery refers to one of the oldest continuous human religious iconographical practices – the story of the Rainbow Serpent. Djaykuŋ (filesnake) lives amongst the dhatam, causing Djari, on the surface of the water. It also refers to the power of the storm created by Wititj, the diagonal lines representing trees that have been knocked down as Wititj moves from place to place.

English born artist John Wolseley has travelled and painted Australia from the central deserts to the forests of Tasmania and the tidal reaches of east Arnhem Land and beyond. His work over the last twenty years has been a search to discover how we dwell and move within landscape – a kind of meditation on how land is a dynamic system of which we are all a part. Through his series of works entitled One Hundred and One Insect Life Stories, Wolseley invites us to enter the umwelt or ‘life world’ of non-human creatures.

View works online:

Dulcie Sharpe

Monique Auricchio

Malaluba Gumana

John Wolseley

Tiwi Focus

Jean Baptiste Apuatimi (dec), Maria Josette Orsto, Raelene Kerinauia and Janice Murray are senior Tiwi artists of national repute. Each has forged a distinct style within the artistic traditions of their culture. This group of women have also been leaders in their art centres and prolific, consistent and innovative artists and printmakers over many years.

The art of mother and daughter duo Jean Baptiste Apuatimi (dec) and Maria Josette Orsto emanates from a deep knowledge of Tiwi culture and ceremonies. Their innovative and powerful designs are characterised by the constant exploration of new ways of expressing connections to their culture.

Raelene Kerinauia is a celebrated artist and finalist in the 2020 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in Darwin and won the Telstra Bark Painting Award in 2011. She is well-known for painting with the kayimwagakimi (ironwood comb).

Janice Murray is celebrated for her depictions of a vast array of Tiwi birds. Her works incorporate the body designs used in the Pukamani ceremony. The geometric patterns reference stories of mythological significance involving ancestors who were changed into animals or birds.

Tiwi art is unique; inspired by the distinct language, ceremonies and material culture of the Tiwi people. Tiwi art is often inspired by two significant ceremonial rituals, Pukumani (mourning ceremony) and Kulama (initiation or yam ceremony) which echo Tiwi cosmology and origin myths of the Tiwi.

Painted designs are based on patterns of lines and dots derived from ritual body paintings, however emphasis is also placed on innovation and individuality rather than associations with totemic groups or kinship systems. The result is powerful and individual imagery created within the bounds of natural pigments. Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, Maria Josette Orsto, Raelene Kerinauia and Janice Murray are extraordinary exponents of this convergence of freedom and constraint informed by the powerful heritage of Tiwi culture.

View works online:

Jean Baptiste Apuatimi (dec)

Maria Josette Orsto

Raelene Kerinauia

Janice Murray

Influential Women

Lorna Naparulla Fencer (dec), Fiona Hall, Queenie McKenzie (dec), Regina Pilawuk Wilson.

Influential Women is the first of our new series that profiles key artists from the Nomad Art Collection. Each month we will curate a small group of selected artists who have made many outstanding prints.

Each of these women are prolific and highly regarded Australian artists, innovators and leaders. Influential in their own communities, they have all developed unique and deep and original art, which is based on their knowledge of culture and community.

Lorna Naparulla Fencer was a celebrated and innovative Warlpiri artist from Lajamanu. Fiona Hall most recently from Tasmania is acclaimed internationally for her environmental and ethno-botanical art and research. Queenie McKenzie was one of the most prominent painters of the Warmun (Turkey Creek) community in Kimberley Ranges and Regina Pilawuk Wilson who co-founded the Peppimenarti Community for the Ngangikurrungurr people in the Daly River region is a leading contemporary artist.

View works online:

Lorna Naparulla Fencer

Fiona Hall

Queenie McKenzie

Regina Pilawuk Wilson

Manifest: selected prints from the Nomad Art Collection

Curated by Angus Cameron

#InThisTogether2020

The works selected for this online exhibition are drawn from over 120 exhibitions and projects Nomad Art has produced over 15 years and celebrates the unique culture and heritage of cross-cultural Australia. The works are essentially personal favourites; a director’s cut if you like and a reflection on a heightened period of Australian art. Delving back over the years, these works emerged like a family of close friends. They manifest as strong and appealing artworks – ones that I would choose to have around me every day; images that manifest as food for the soul and the mind.

Limited edition prints have their own process and aesthetic; they are not like their often larger and more expensive cousins – canvas and bark paintings. Prints are commonly smaller and accessible snippets of larger stories. Printmaking is an affordable and democratic art form; the notion of printmaking can be thought of as a revolutionary activity that promulgates ideas Prints are often embedded with strong political statements which make the work so poignant and important. Most of all they are a joy to behold and own as part of one’s life — on the walls that surround us every single day.

View the exhibition catalogue

Animal Studies by Monique Auricchio

Monique Auricchio has developed a reputation based on a combination of highly developed printing skills and imaginative imagery. Her work examines human perceptions of animals, often using shadow and dark tones to emphasise the threatening or foreboding elements of the relationship.

Monique Auricchio’s art is often whimsical and theatrical, creating dreamlike images in shadowy, semi-urban settings. The works are layered with allegorical and proverbial references, yet evoke a sense of the unfamiliar. Images often feature animals infused with human sensibility. Birds provide the artist with a rich and abundant source of subject matter, as she explores the fragile and peculiar pecking order of the human and animal condition with satirical warmth and gentle humour.

Shining Light: prints by leading contemporary Indigenous artists from Nomad Art Collections

Curated by Talitha Kennedy

An exhibition of limited edition prints by artists from remote Australia. Featuring works by: Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, Janangoo Butcher Cherel (dec), Pedro Wonaeamirri, Elizabeth Nyumi (dec), Bardayal Nadjamerrek (dec), Dorothy Napangardi (dec), Ronnie Tjampitjinpa.

Selected from Nomad Art’s comprehensive catalogue of limited edition prints, this exhibition celebrates the strength and diversity of art from the Top End, Kimberley and Central Australia through etchings, silkscreens, linocuts and lithographs.

‘Printmaking has been the ignition for many leading Indigenous artists who headline contemporary biennales and win major art awards. Works by these artists have energised the contemporary art scene with powerful creations that roar with deep culture and gift us an experience of country. In light of recent grand scale installations and immersive media works grabbing attention in the big exhibitions and events, I want to draw attention to the intimacy of prints on paper’. Talitha Kennedy 2020

View the exhibition catalogue

Enlighten Canberra

Projections on Parliament House by Jacqueline Gribbin.

Projections from the portfolio – Dear Gilbert…(Song for the Ichthyologist), by Jacqueline Gribbin 2017-2019. To create these works Darwin artist Jacqueline Gribbin revived a collection of old and forgotten relief printing blocks of scientific drawings by Gilbert Percy Whitley (Ichthyologist and Curator of Fishes, Australian Museum, 1922-1964).

Recent Prints by Neridah Stockley

Neridah Stockley is a Northern Territory artist who lives and works in Alice Springs. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (painting) from the National Art School in Sydney, 2001, and has been an arts worker for Papunya Tula Artists, Bindi Inc. and Maruku Arts.

This series of etchings by renown Alice Springs based artist Neridah Stockley was editioned at Basil Hall Editions, Braidwood, NSW in 2019. The collection includes evocative studies of Fremantle, Jordan and Morocco. Stockley’s paired back images draw upon elements of line, space, shape and colour to capture the essence of these urban landscapes.