Floating life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre art

29 Touching the past: Hunting the future Diana Wood Conroy ‘Floating Life: Contemporary Aboriginal Fibre Art’ heralds a reaffirmation of fibre and sculptural traditions across Australia. The art works have been collected and documented from a broad geographical area, and this exhibition responds to the flow of interest from collectors and curators in major institutions towards remote communities and to individual artists — negotiating with arts advisers who mediate between the innovation of the artists themselves, and uncertain markets. ‘Floating’ and ‘fleeting’ have the same root — rocking on water, transient, moving. The term ‘floating world’ in Japanese art is about living for the moment in the delicate gestures of a geisha in an Utamaro woodcut. Speaking for Aboriginal philosophy, Mandawuy Yunupingu emphasised the unchanging importance of water as a metaphor in comprehending the relationships between Yolngu and white or balanda cultures in north-eastern Arnhem Land. 1 In 1995, I wrote down these words from a monument to Roy Daynga Marika (1931–93) in Yirrkala: In teaching and learning there is always a dynamic interaction of knowledge traditions. Fresh water from the land bubbling up in freshwater springs to make waterholes and saltwater from the sea are interacting with each other bringing together the energy of the tide with the energy of the bubbling spring. Water . . . ebbs and flows, in this way Yolngu and Balanda traditions can work together. There must be balance . . . The bark painting in ‘Floating Life’ by Dhuwarrwarr Marika, Milngurr 2007, directly refers to this knowledge of water. Many of the artists in this exhibition from northern Australia, such as Elizabeth Djakminy Gurruwirri, Margaret Djogiba, Elizabeth Djuttara or Timothy Cook, still hold onto the memory of their grandparents’ accounts of the ‘pre-contact’ era in the early twentieth century. By contrast, for southern artists, such as Yvonne Koolmatrie, Aunti Corrie Fullard, Jeannette James, Jonathan Jones or Lorraine Connelly-Northey, the stories handed down from earlier times are often ones of separation and tearing loss of land and language. Yvonne Koolmatrie comments pungently on fragments retained from that history of loss: So many of the stories have gone from Lake Alexandrina, even the secret stories. I still have some, from my mother, since it has been given to me to carry on the weaving. Stories about the morning and evening star – the Evening star is an old man, chasing the young girl, the Morning star – he just gets a glimpse of her and then she’s gone. 2 ‘Floating Life’ offers a sense of immediacy and movement aroused by the works, of objects carried and worn while walking across forests and grasslands or fishing by the sea. The spontaneous impact of the work suggests ways of living that are not rooted in towns and cities, but allude to a rhythm of moving that is the heritage of an almost unimaginably persistent nomadism. Embedded in the processes of making, and of collecting plant materials, shells and feathers, wood, ochre, resin and wax, are stories that tie together country and family with ancestral entities. The sound of the human voice telling stories or singing, a pervasive oral environment, accompanies the reiterated movements of splicing, plaiting, twining, threading and carving. Indigenous writer Alexis Wright, in her vast novel Carpentaria (2007) about a town on the spreading estuarine and mangrove coasts of northern Australia, speaks of how people still hunt and gather in great areas of the Dhuwarrwarr Marika Rirratjingu people NT b.1946 Milngurr (detail) 2007 Natural pigments on bark 70 x 46cm Acc. 2007.252 Purchased 2007. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation