The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 70 Young girl sitting down 2009 Hand-thrown earthenware with applied decoration, natural wax and knotted cotton bilum / 11 x 6 x 8cm Susu mama with piglet and baby 2000 Hand-thrown earthenware with applied decoration and natural wax / 16 x 7 x 9.4cm Squatting mother 2011 Hand-thrown earthenware with applied decoration and natural wax / 14 x 11 x 10.5cm Purchased 2021 with funds from the Estate of Jessica Ellis through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Phoebe Arasepa Gole beating tapa / Image courtesy: Mary and David Gole A large spherical-shaped pot with a small opening at its top sits in a circular, natural fibre ring on the table. It displays the facial features of a woman who appears to have lifted her chin, with head tilted back slightly so that her nose raises gently in the air. This woman’s eyes squint and her lips are together in a relaxed smile, as if she can feel the admiring looks directed at the textured marks decorating her face. The head and face, coiled, paddled and sculpted to create Joyce Mary Arasepa Gole’s Water storage pot – woman’s face 2013 is an iconic image created to acknowledge and honour the significance of women in Papua New Guinea. Gole, now in her eighties, reflects that the face evokes that of her mother, a village woman who worked hard from daybreak to dusk nurturing produce from the garden, carrying firewood and water, and cooking and caring for her family of four children. Phoebe Arasepa also created pots in which the family’s water was carried and stored, as well as those in which meals were prepared. Gole has shared stories of her digging the clay out of the earth, carrying it home and then beating it with a stick into elegant spherical vessels. 1 Gole attributes the feeling that she has for clay — the knowledge that exists in her hands — to watching her mother rolling and coiling the textured earth. As a young girl, Gole watched occasionally and from a distance; now she wishes that she had accepted the invitations to come closer, to sit with her mother, listen to the stories and receive her wisdom, but she was ‘too carried away with (her own) young life’. 2 While the elegant pots and figurines that Gole taught herself to create in her adult years are inspired by women such as her mother, and the rich diversity of pottery traditions that they nurtured, the distinctive vessels and sculptures are undeniably hers. Working with commercial clay, Gole uses traditional techniques to build her earthenware, decorating them with her own designs and signature rich black colouring achieved through applying a mix of seaweed, salt, sawdust and leaves to the pot and turning it — like meat on a barbeque — gently in a low-temperature fire. Visiting Gole in the open-air studio under her house, she is surrounded by both traditional and contemporary tools of the trade: smooth shells for burnishing, garlic presses to create hair, wooden paddles and a small gas kiln. Photographs document the artist at her bench, working designs into pots or moulding forms from the clay, coaxing them into forms that she would decorate with bilas (ornamentation), such as walking sticks, lap-laps (sarongs) and bilums (knotted bags) worn by her countrymen and women. Many of the figurines respond to stories Gole has read in the Post Courier (daily national newspaper). The very first, a young susu (breastfeeding mother), was motivated by a story of rising intolerance within Papua New Guinea to the sight of women breastfeeding in public. Incensed, Gole began creating her own figures to honour and support these women in the face of criticism roused by imposed foreign ideas of morality. Small sculptures of men dressed as warriors and in traditional dress have since joined the women figurines as Gole reflects on the loss of traditional practices that once defined and directed the conduct of her country’s young men. Gole is one of Papua New Guinea’s pioneering female artists — and one of the country’s only ‘contemporary’ or ‘modern’ potters — and her unique art chronicles the everyday lives of Papua New Guinean women and men as they negotiate a mixture of new and old ways of living. Her works draw on centuries-old traditions, marrying them with new technologies to make life in Papua New Guinea today visible. Ruth McDougall Endnotes 1 Joyce Mary Arasepa Gole, interview with the author, October 2019. 2 Ruth McDougall, ‘Mary Gole: Interview by Ruth McDougall’, in No. 1 Neighbour: Art in Papua New Guinea 1966–2016 [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2016, p.108. Joyce Mary Arasepa Gole OL Orokaiva people Born 1941, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea Lives and works in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea