The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Lorraine Connelly-Northey takes the most incongruous, abject, rusted materials — bed springs, corrugated iron, flat iron, chicken wire, mouse wire, barbed wire, even wire from the Rabbit Proof Fence — and wrangles them into shape in her outdoor ‘studio’, ankle-deep in water if the weather is against her. She relishes working outside, close to the earth, and embraces the physical demands of her process. She needs space to lay out her materials and gauge their potential, moving bits around in endless configurations, finally shaping them into narbongs (collecting bags) 1 , vessels (koolimans), apparel (o’possum skin cloaks) and poignant cultural statements of deep personal significance. Where necessary, Connelly-Northey uses her body to press and bend the unyielding metals into forms that honour the resilience and strength of her people and their unique material culture. Though of Waradgerie 2 descent on her mother’s side, Connelly- Northey was born on Wamba Wamba and Wadi Wadi lands and grew up in north-west Victoria, where the mallee bush meets the Murray River. She learnt cultural lore from her mother, who instilled in her the ideal of collecting only five things from the bush: stones, bones, shells, wood and feathers. However, her family lived a subsistence lifestyle where nothing was wasted and the young farm girl, influenced by the inventive resourcefulness of her Irish father, developed a sharp eye for anything that could be recycled, repurposed or reconfigured. As she accompanied him on ‘spare parts’ collecting expeditions to country tips and dumps, he taught her to breathe life into these abandoned leftovers of rural living. Her parents’ influence is still clearly present in works that straddle traditional Aboriginal and modern Western art in a vibrant contemporary practice that speaks across space and time. Connelly-Northey learned to weave with natural fibres from Ngarrindjeri weaver, Yvonne Koolmatrie, at a Swan Hill Regional Gallery workshop in 1995. Though she showed great talent for the craft, she became increasingly uncomfortable with using grasses and sedges from the land and so began drawing on her knowledge of traditional weaving techniques to reshape iron, mesh or wire into string bags. With this substitution her works developed a conceptual edge, evoking the sinuous lines of woven-fibre bags while offering biting commentary on the waste that permeates contemporary ‘throw-away’ society. With her deep affinity for the hunter–gatherer tradition, denied her people through colonisation, Connelly-Northey found that making these contemporary narbongs helped dissipate her painful feelings of displacement and cultural loss. She developed a powerful aesthetic appreciation of battered surfaces and twisted forms and found them ideal for her unique artistic expressions and political statements. In her hands, the unlikely metals sparkle with wit and humour and have an elegance that belies their drab origins. Connelly-Northey’s endless variations on the narbong are distinguished by her consummate sense of proportion and texture. Fine wire forms are tiny, delicate and ornamented with soft road- kill feathers or echidna quills, whereas oversized versions suggest bags that could hold bountiful harvests of wild bush foods, or the shelters built by her ancestors. In the Gallery, long wire handles and open-wire frames project finely drawn shadow lines onto the wall. While remaining respectful of past generations, Connelly-Northey now scales these bags beyond a manageable size to emphasise their cultural status: they become a commanding presence, impossible to ignore. Connelly-Northey made these works in the winter of 2012 in country that energises and inspires her. Features of familiar landscapes are reflected in the striated patterns, patinated surfaces, textures and angles of her sculpted narbongs. Her narbongs are illusory, though. Ripped and ruptured, they have no practical use, yet harmony is achieved through the dazzling moiré effect of filmy flywire, the beautiful colours and textures of fragile, rusted metals, and even in the flaking, cream-painted ripple iron that is reminiscent of a cold bush bathroom. Though traditional bags are no longer used for hunting and gathering or ceremony, Lorraine Connelly- Northey’s narbongs recall times when they were essential to the plentiful, elegant, artistic life lived by her ancestors. Diane Moon 1 ‘Marsupial pouch’ in Waradgerie language. 2 ‘Wiradjuri’ has many postcolonial spellings. Lorraine Connelly-Northey has specifically chosen to use ‘Waradgerie’ as it is the same spelling used by her mother’s father, Alfred ‘Knocker’ Williams, on the back of his works of art. LORRAINE CONNELLY-NORTHEY Mistress of iron 103