Floating life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre art

124 125 Other Ngarrindjeri looked for employment as itinerant workers in the pastoral industry beyond their traditional country. By necessity, Koolmatrie’s life took this course. Her mother, Connie, had grown up on Rabbit Island on the Coorong, while her father, Joe, was a desert man from Ooldea. For most of the artist’s childhood, the family worked on sheep stations, travelling south regularly to join relatives picking fruit on the irrigated blocks of South Australia’s Riverland. Then, she married Chris Koolmatrie and moved to the River, where they worked picking oranges, grapes and apricots. Baskets of fruit were graded for quality — fast work earned more money. In 1982, after raising seven children, Koolmatrie had time to think about her culture. She learned the art of traditional coiled basketry from Dorothy Kartinyeri, and excelled in recreating the woven forms of her ancestors. The esteem with which Koolmatrie’s weavings are regarded is derived from the quality of the materials she selects, and the strength and assurance with which her sedges are bundled and bound. Plucked from relative obscurity, her work was exhibited in the floating city of Venice, where its austere purity was counter-pointed with the gestural authority of Emily Kame Kngwarreye and the intuitive flow of Judy Watson. Hard work had paid off, and the rest, as they say, is history. Slowly, as she mastered her medium, Koolmatrie began to embellish the time-honored forms — ‘sister baskets’, which had their origin in the tourist industry, grew legs and quills to become echidnas, and the famous funnel- like eel trap eventually turned in on itself to become a howling bunyip. Koolmatrie’s imagination has literally taken flight, sprouting wings to become a biplane, echoing the creative ingenuity of Janet Watson who, on seeing an airplane in 1942, decided to recreate its form in the distinctive Kingston weaving style. Koolmatrie’s imagination has continued to ascend, most notably with the remarkable Hot-air balloon 2006, fashioned from an inverted, oversized coiled basket, from which a smaller shallow container is suspended. The purity of its form is in stark contrast to the ornate polychrome aerostations that excited French crowds in pre-revolutionary Paris — or the balloon, bristling with scientific instruments, that attempted the first airborne crossing of the English Channel one winter afternoon in 1885, rising in a triumphant arch to clear the cliffs at Calais. The journey of Ngarrindjeri weaving, from the huts of Encounter Bay to the crafted form of Koolmatrie’s Hot-air balloon , however, is no less remarkable. Yabbie trap 2007–08 Coil-woven sedge grass and river rushes 50 x 40 x 76cm Acc. 2008.183 Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund The following references were consulted in preparing this essay: Peter Sutton, Philip Jones and Steve Hemming, ‘Survival, regeneration and impact’, in Peter Sutton (ed.), Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia [exhibition catalogue], South Australian Museum, Adelaide, and The Asia Society Galleries, New York, 1988, p.188. Diana Wood Conroy, ‘Koolmatrie, Yvonne ( 1944- )’, in Sylvia Kleinert and Margot Neale (eds), The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture , Oxford University Press, 2000, p.619. Adele Pring, Aboriginal Artists in South Australia , Department of Education Training and Employment, Adelaide, 1998, pp.104–5. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder , Harper Press, London, 2008, pp.125–62. Hetti Perkins and Brenda L Croft, Fluent: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Judy Watson [exhibition catalogue], Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1997. Ronald Berndt, Catherine Berndt and John Stanton, A World that Was, The Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia , Miegunyah Press, University of Melbourne, 1993, pp.281–300. Biplane 2006 Coil-woven sedge grass and river rushes 65 x 92 x 112cm Acc. 2007.031 Purchased 2006 with funds from Cathryn Mittelheuser, am , through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation