North by North-West: Form, symbol & texture

Tue 11 Jul 2023

The exhibition ‘North by North-West’ at the Queensland Art Gallery presents recent acquisitions and old favourites from the Gallery’s Indigenous Australian art collection, highlighting unique visual threads and continuities that traverse the top half of the continent. Over our blog series we will delve into the exhibition themes: ‘Journey across the Northern Territory’; ‘Seven Sisters’; ‘Geometries’; and ‘The North-West’.

From the Tiwi in the north to the Pitjantjatjara people of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in the south, and across to the Gija and Bardi peoples from Warmun and Broome in the Kimberley region, ‘North by North-West’ celebrates the regionally specific styles of each Country. These characteristics have often stemmed from traditional body designs and cultural objects, which were shared or traded across borders. In this display, historic artworks are contextualised by contemporary reworkings of these traditional practices.

Particular attention is paid to the trade in artistic traditions and stories through songlines. Common motifs and ancestral stories are transformed across mediums through innovative explorations of form, symbol and texture. Works range from representations of the Seven Sisters constellation to the politically engaged watercolours created by contemporary Hermannsburg School artists.

Nora Wompi Kunawarritji 2011

Nora Wompi was born in the Great Sandy Desert at Lilbaru, close to Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route. In Kunawarritji 2011 she emphasises the metaphysical essence of this landscape rather than its visible features. Lines of tali (sand hills) and jila (circular rockholes) appear tangentially, more as a mirage than as material presences. Here, she expresses the ‘big picture’ of her Country, centred on a vital freshwater source that lies far south-west of Balgo. Wompi shares her perception of the site through pale, milky tones that recall the blinding whiteness of the salt lakes that pattern the landscape, and also suggests their deepening tones, which fade in the light of the setting sun.

D Harding What is theirs is ours now (I do not claim to own) 2018

In the diptych What is theirs is ours now (I do not claim to own) 2018 d harding has deployed Reckitt’s Blue — a laundry whitener that was popular during the colonial period — to comment on their personal history and the impact of settlement on First Nations peoples. The artwork demonstrates the complex ways in which harding has used the pigment. For the left-hand panel, they worked the colour into the linen support with a hand broom, an act that pays homage to their matrilineal kin who were forced into domestic servitude by European settlers. For the right-hand panel, the artist used the most expensive paintbrush they could find to stain the surface with pigment, using the same motions as they made with the broom. Their final gesture was to spit ochre from their Country across the work in a single horizontal band, in part an allusion to the rock-painting techniques of their forebears. This physical act was both an aesthetic decision and a conceptual one, marking a metaphorical shift from these laden histories towards a new phase in their practice.

Timo Hogan Lake Baker 2021

In recent years, Pitjantjatjara artist Timo Hogan has developed to become one of the Western Desert’s most notable painters. Lake Baker 2021 shows Hogan’s characteristically painterly depiction of the important salt lake in his Country, Pukunkura (Lake Baker). Each of his paintings about Lake Baker translates the Wati Kutjara Tjukurpa (Two Men Creation Line) of his birthright. Hogan has depicted the men as two black and white roundels in the lower third of the composition, and explains:

These two men watch carefully as the resident Wanampi (magical water serpent) departs his kapi ngura (home in the rock hole) and becomes the fearful, the all-powerful, as he skirts the edge of the lake, always watching, aware of the Two Men. These Creation Beings came before and shaped the environment as they moved through it, leaving indelible physical reminders of their power and presence for all to see.

Katina Davidson is Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA

North by North-West
11 February 2023 – 2 March 2025
Queensland Art Gallery