THE AUSTRALIAN, THURSDAY, JULY 24, 2014theaustralian.com.au/arts ARTS 15

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Seductive, terrifying response to novels

DANCE is often a response to music but Ochre’s Articulating Landscapes is created around text written by Stephen Scourfield and Kim Scott, who pay homage in their novels to this vast land and man’s scary, subsidiary place within it.

If the small Masonic Hall inwhich we sit seems therefore imbued with the terrifying yet seductive aura of Picnic at Hanging Rock, it’s by design and, like kids at story time, we’re loving it.

Each work is well-crafted and, propless, relies on the physicality of this small company’s seven dancers, all rippling upper-body movement and strong, pillar-like haunches.

They are accompanied by some haunting music (including a Bach cantata and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata) and Vermeer-inspired side-lighting. Strangely enough, this European influence sits well with the quintessential Australian ambience.

Jesse Martin’s opening GhostGums and Penny Mullen’s In Between both used the full ensemble, which variously disentangled from scrums, locked eyes with, and defiantly advanced upon the audience, to convey the “confinement of scraggly, twisted, pressing scrub” described by Scott, or Scourfield’s “conspiracy between the blood red earth and china blue sky”.

Matthew Tupper’s Descaped,and Gary Lang’s Space within Space featured pas de deux. Tyrel Dulvarie and Yilin Kong were as exquisite in their dark, threatening coupling and sharp disengagement, interpreting mountain and granite ranges, as Floeur Alder and Jesse Martin were in their sensuous duet, suggesting the glide of rockpool water over limbs.

Alder’s Unbreakable Spirit,inspired by differing generations and performed as solos by Kenny Johnson, Yolanda Lowatta and Martin, hummed with an intense polyphony of crouched geometry and expansive gestures, although the ending was ragged.

To crown the evening, and toreverse the mechanism, Mullen’s Gravitas inspired Scourfield this time to respond to the choreography, in which he wrote that dancers Dulvarie, Johnson and Martin were as “smooth as sweat, sweet as weeping”. It’s true the three men had, as he put it, a “velvet” aura in the sweep of their midnight-blue skirts and their smooth, powerful muscular poses (reminiscent of Mr World competitions) but their significance seemed out of place with the spirit of the rest.

In tackling the themes of isolation, panic, awe and intangibility of landscape the company excelled, although there was no overt joy expressed, just reverential awe.

Tonight at Masonic Hall; July 31 at All Saints College, Bullcreek, Western Australia. Tickets: $15, online. Duration: 70min.

DEEP in the dune country of thewestern desert, beyond the range-line of the Rawlinsons, beyond thegap at Circus Water, lies the sacredsite of Kaarrku, remote, and littlevisited, with a disused, rustedwater tank close by.

It is an ochre deposit, but of anunusual kind: the hematite oreburied there is rich, and concen-trated, and highly oxidised. It is ina declivity. You can reach downinto the hole and easily bring upwhole lumps of ochre — ochre sofine-grained it has a crumblingtexture, and seems almost likedust or powder in the hand. Oncontact with moisture, though, it isinstantly transformed; it turnsbright blood-red — and in the des-ert thought-world it is blood’sequivalent, the blood of stone androck, precious beyond measure,much used by senior men in ritual.

Many tales begin at Kaarrku,but there is one story-cycle aboveall others that belongs to this site.And one of the inland’s most spec-tacularly gifted artists has beenquietly painting that story for sev-eral years now, in continuallyvarying styles and colours, withever more startling results.

Nyarapayi Giles, a slight, en-gaging, intensely active woman,now in her late 70s, first came tothe attention of art co-ordinatorsin the desert almost a decade agowhen she began painting along-side members of her extendedfamily during a stay in the littlecommunity of Patjarr. Even herearliest works had a vigour tothem; she painted bold, intricatedesigns, she had a way with colour.It was the peak of the desert artvogue: many of her relatives werejust then coming to prominence,and achieving great success.

Word of Nyarapayi’s paintingsfiltered out as she moved between

communities — but her home waslittle Tjukurla, a settlement on theback road between Kintore andDocker River, and she beganpainting consistently only in 2007,when a fledgling art centre was setup there. The first co-ordinatorappointed to Tjarlirli Arts, VickyBosisto, was immediately struckby the works Nyarapayi was mak-ing: poised, balanced designs, fullof movement, full of the flash oflife. Together, the two went on afast-paced journey together intothe art world.

One of Nyarapayi’s first can-vases for Tjarlirli was hung in the2008 Telstra National Aboriginaland Torres Strait Islander Awardexhibition: it drew attention.Eagle-eyed Perth gallerist MarkWalker had already spotted herpaintings in the course of his owndesert travels, and he gave her apair of solo shows. The works werestrong and much appreciated. Allseemed fair set.

But the trough of the global fi-nancial crisis was fast approach-ing. Private collectors hadvanished from the market, andthere were the usual ceremonialobligations and familial disrup-tions of remote community life tokeep Nyarapayi from her creativetasks. Pieces by her would crop upduring the next few years in groupshows from the region’s artcentres, a handful were bought byinstitutions, but the closest, keen-

est followers of the desert paintingmovement were waiting to seemore. They already knew whatshe was — an artist without limits.

In this camp was the leadinggallerist of central Australia, Dal-las Gold. He had admired her can-vases from the first time heencountered them. Last Septem-ber, at his Raft Artspace in AliceSprings, he staged a majestic showof paintings from the far westerndesert. He called it The Wild Ones,only slightly tongue in cheek, andtwo large, vivid pieces by Nyara-payi were dominant.

Both displayed her trademarkdesign, two roundels, enmeshed in

subsidiary lines and arcs of vibrantcolour, but her palette had devel-oped: she was using blues andaquas and complex shades ofmauve and mulberry and purple,yellow filigree on green ground,red upon cream. As soon as he laideyes on them Gold felt once morethe thrill of the Aboriginal artlover discovering a new world.

“She was on fire last year,” heremembers. “The colours and theway they were set together was

something I hadn’t seen before.What’s impressive about her art isits sheer dynamism. It’s awe-in-spiring, and it’s joyous — you getdrawn in, and study them, andthey don’t diminish, they keep de-livering. Often the work’s rough,but when its various elementscome together the results are ex-traordinary. They are works with agrandeur, they resonate. I believeshe serves as a conduit for thepower of desert religion, for thosebeliefs. You see in them that mix oftalent and authority that makesthe paintings jump.”

Indeed, Gold likes to compareNyarapayi’s work to the strongest

pieces of the great male artists ofthe region: a striking thought.

“Usually,” he says, “there’s softaesthetic that becomes very plain-ly visible when you put a paintingby a desert woman next to a workfrom a senior man. I see in herwork a sinew, something morethan just a play of colour or com-position. I feel it’s somethingabout that magic of someone withdeep ritual knowledge painting.”

But what might that know-

ledge consist of? What are its con-tours, how does it manifest itself,who from the wider world couldread it? As it happens, the “out-side” stories of the Kaarrku ochremine and the nearby site of War-murrunngu where Nyarapayi wasborn are reasonably well-estab-lished: it has become standardpractice for desert painters to pro-vide a brief account of the creationnarratives they place at the centreof their works, and in the case ofKaarrku the story is especiallysuggestive and offers a little way into the artist’s hectic, richly col-oured realm. The Kaarrku land-scape is the country of the emu.

It lies near the great arc ofmen’s sacred sites that radiate tothe northwest of Tjukurla. Eventoday, emus are particularly pres-ent there, and in the epoch whenshape was being imprinted uponthe deserts, ancestral emus wentdigging amid the mesas and theridges and the claypans, diggingfor ochre, the blood of life. Theconcentric circles that dominateNyarapayi’s paintings representthe ochre-laden feathers of theemu reaching down and digging inthe pit. The art becomes the coun-try, the tale dictates its pattern, thecircle completes itself.

But the careers of desert artistsdepend on fortune and on circum-stance for their fruition, and Nyar-apayi’s story entered a newchapter in 2012 with the arrival at

Tjarlirli of its present art co-ordi-nator, Nyssa Miller, with whomshe formed a fresh bond. Some-thing in her art had crystallised:she set to work once more in thelittle community art studio. Thesmall group of collectors and artworld insiders who have seenthose most recent works made byNyarapayi can see the change —an intensification of her paintingstyle. She would always give herworks a trademark sense of move-ment. Their colours, though, wereof a piece, until now; they werecompositions that relied on a kindof harmony.

The handful of large new worksmade in the past year or so take anew road. Icon mark and in-fillstand in counterpoint: a concen-tric circle set will be azure, placedagainst a crimson ground, or at-lantic green against brick-pink,with accents of ultramarine andpale lime entering the colour field.The pattern of sandhill lines andinterlocking curves spreads out, invarying shades, reds, greys,creams, oranges, always setagainst each other, so a single cellor fragment of the whole is disson-ant, but the whole builds to a richintermesh. Plenty of other desertartists have gone down this path ofusing colours that seem at warwith each other.

But in Nyarapayi’s new work,warring colour seems not so muchto highlight pattern as to convey

energy and the flicker of light andlife. Three of the most dramatic ofthese new canvases will go on viewfor the first time at Darwin’s Out-station Gallery this month.

“They form a sequence,” saysOutstation’s Matt Ward. “There’ssomething deeply moving aboutthese paintings. The feeling I gotwhen I was undoing the roll ofcanvases, as they were being un-veiled before me, I just knew fromthe moment I touched them andopened them up and saw the veryedge of the design in paint theywere going to be masterpieces.

“I’d seen images of them byemail, but this was something spe-cial. Even with just a few marksshowing, I could feel myself beingswept away. These central pass-ages, where she’s showing the emuspirit being released from the rock— she seems to me to have cap-tured that moment to perfection,but even if you don’t know thestory you get the feeling, you catchthe moment, and what’s happen-ing. Sometimes desert art can doextraordinary things.”

How, though? Nyarapayi’scentral roundels, with their wilddeep greys and creams and tawnyreds blurring into each other, andtheir overdrawn, emphatic lines,shouldn’t work — yet they holdthe eye, and announce them-selves, and convey the essence ofthe subject of their composition.They present the artist’s way ofseeing, and bring the viewer closeto an event unimaginably far off inthought and time.

Until recently, Nyarapayi wasan obscure great-grandmother ina tiny, back-road bush commun-ity. If anyone in the Western worldknew her or remembered her, itwas solely for her involuntarycameo role as a young woman res-cued from beside a desert track bythe mid-century “safari man”Keith Adams, who included hertravails in a much-viewed bushadventure film.

Today, though, her place in theWestern world is rather different.She is at once painter and presen-ter and preserver of traditions, anold role, and creative reconceiverof the story-cycles of her birth-place and the past. New and old to-gether, in embrace as strong as thejuxtaposed colours of her art.

Nyarapayi Giles’s new paintings are included in Darwin Outstation Gallery’s exhibition Tjarlirli Arts: Our Home in Colour, until July 30.

Three of Nyarapayi’s large new paintings, all acrylic on canvas and forming a sequence, will be shown in Darwin this month

Painter, presenter, preserver

COLIN MURTY

Cossack entrant Clifton Mack and Colours of my Country

SMALL flitting bats, moths andthe invasive stains of cyclonic mudcould not deter Cossack ArtAward’s project curator KatyEccles from hanging 317 works onthe walls of the historic ghost townin the Pilbara, where Australia’srichest regional art prize is heldeach year.

Winners of the total $100,000prizemoney, spread over 10 cate-gories, were announced at theweekend in Cossack’s customshouse and bond store. JoshuaCocking, a Broome-based teacher,was announced best overallwinner with his portrait Rosie.

their art practice from a nationalpoint of view. For them, they makeart day to day to put money in theirpocket. One of the conversationswe’re constantly having is howthey can grow their art practicebeyond the reality they live in.”

In response, Cossack’s artaward offers a six-week residencyfor the overall winner, with oppor-tunity to work with local artists.

Meanwhile, two local artcentres — the Roebourne ArtGroup and Yinjaa-Barni Art — de-liver valuable income to their com-munities and unique styles.

Says Bradfield: “It’s like havingtwo tyre-fitting businesses in town:each tends to do things slightlydifferently.”

Yinjaa-Barni art centre man-ager Patricia Floyd say the artgroup, which began in 2005, strug-gles to keep up with demand.“Apart from the two Perth shows,we have exhibitions each year inSydney, Singapore and Fremantlegalleries. We don’t have a lot oftime because there’s a business torun.”

Floyd, who is temporarily livinginterstate, keeps a close eye on artproduction by holding Skype con-versations with each artist aboutthe progress of their latest canvas.

Several painters from the Yin-jaa-Barni group did well in thisyear’s awards: Wendy Darby forCountry with Saltlakes and Mar-lene Harold for Emu Seeds. Clifton

Mack, the group’s most prominentartist, narrowly missed out on his10th Cossack prize.

Meanwhile, the Cossack artaward, hosted by the City of Karra-tha, may need reshaping as its22nd event ends and the paintingscome off the walls.

Eccles says new investmentand a permanent curatorial pres-ence are needed — Artsource isbrought in for only a few weekseach year. She says it has reachedthe limit of its hanging space, withnot all of this year’s entries able tobe hung.

“As the award grows and thestandard of the artworks increases,the need becomes greater for pro-fessional art-handlers to run it.”

Having a ready market of cashed-up buyers threatens the national outlook of Pilbara artistsVICTORIA LAURIE

Yet Cossack and the local Pil-bara art industry face a quandary.According to Eccles’s colleagueRon Bradfield, an indigenous artadviser with Perth-based Art-source, almost any paintings pro-duced in Karratha, the resourcecity that hosts the award, and innearby Roebourne, are likely to bebought by cashed-up resourceworkers or mining corporations.And each year, two huge exhibi-tions of 100 paintings each are sentdown to Perth to hang in the cor-porate foyers of Rio Tinto andWoodside, both major resourceindustry operators in the Pilbara.

That advantage may, however,be weakening the impulse topursue higher quality and a more

elevated national profile forPilbara-based art, which has onlybeen produced in earnest for about15 years. It means the artists andtheir work are far less familiar toart collectors and galleries thanthe established artistic move-ments of the Kimberley andcentral Australia.

“Pilbara artists have the moststable economic environment inwhich to sell work, compared withthe rest of Australia,” says Brad-field. “But they work in a bubblethat has its own economy, its owncash cow. Artists know if theypaint, people will buy it. And theyget caught up in it.

“The artistic consequence isthat people have no need to look at

Nyarapayi Giles no longer lives in obscurity in a tiny bush community

NICOLAS ROTHWELL

In Nyarapayi’s new work, warring colour seems not so much to highlight pattern as to convey energy and the flicker of light and life

Nyarapayi Giles’s new paintings have been described as masterpieces

DANCEArticulating Landscapes Ochre Contemporary Dance Company. Masonic Contemporary Hall, Nedlands, July 22.

The dancers were‘smooth as sweat,sweet as weeping’

STEPHEN SCOURFIELDAUTHOR