Floating life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre art

101 Lorraine Connelly-Northey: Revisioning the past Bree Richards Lorraine Connelly-Northey reconfigures the detritus of European colonisation to create works that are both intimate and strangely forbidding. Her works are riddled with holes and contradictions — cast in angry and unforgiving materials, they are also poignant and touching gestures of cultural resurgence. Ancient weaving techniques are reinterpreted in a thoroughly contemporary way to create sculptures that are at once beautiful, political and wistful. Connelly-Northey uses abject, cast-off ingredients to produce baskets and bags that radically revision the past. Her use of metal, mesh and wire, in combination with feathers, shells and echidna quills, is expressive of an Indigenous history lived in coexistence with a settler colonial society. Connelly-Northey breathes new life into those products of industry that have been forgotten, discarded and left to rust, and in the process comments on the complicated position Indigenous knowledge occupies in Australian society today. Her work speaks across space and time to explore what possible role art and alchemy might play in cultural exchange and the creation of identity. Of Waradgerie and Irish descent, Connelly-Northey was born in Swan Hill, in north-west Victoria, where she continues to live and work. 1 Despite her great interest in fibre work, ‘her dislocation from country provided stronger creative attunement with displaced materials in her immediate environment than the use of fibre’: 2 Born on the tribal boundary of the Wamba Wamba peoples of Waradgerie descent, I remain uneasy about collecting traditional women’s grasses and sedges from both the Wamba Wamba and neighbouring Wadi Wadi tribal boundaries. 3 This led her to incorporate industrial remnants that she and her father gleaned from abandoned rubbish dumps on trips into the bush. Her approach to basket-making is thus a blending together of skills and attitudes inherited from both her parents: resourcefulness and thriftiness from her Irish father, and traditional weaving practice inspired by her Aboriginal mother. Connelly-Northey merges practical objects from the past with the art of now. She weaves together new forms both practically and metaphorically — warp and weft are, in this instance, the personal and traditional mythologies of Aboriginal and white culture. Her works recall the organic and shapely constructions of Aboriginal basketry, yet, rather than building up volume through layered coils and bundles of fibre, sinuous bunches of form are evoked through decidedly hostile materials. This is the paradox embodied in her practice — while the appearance and shape of her baskets is inviting, the ingredients that go into their creation are harsh and threatening. In this artist’s hands, traditional forms are reconfigured and given new life. Not only do these intriguing objects relate to the history and culture of the Waradgerie, they evoke a sense of her own deeply personal connection to the land. Connelly-Northey recasts coolamons and narrbongs (string bags) from bits of beds, corrugated iron, and rusted wires from fences and back sheds. Riverside reeds have been exchanged for oxidised metal scrap. Eventually, these form simulations of real baskets, which, says artist Julie Gough, acts to ‘make sense of and value the detritus that holds, as able as a woven basket, a story of enforced cultural destruction and phoenix-like revival’. 4 Lorraine Connelly-Northey Waradgerie people Vic b.1962 Narrbong (String bag) 2008 Rusted rabbit-proof fencing wire and fencing wire 81 x 28 x 20cm Acc. 2008.138 Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund