The exhibition ‘Embodied Knowledge’ may have closed, however you can still delve into our video archive of Queensland contemporary art and artists from the far north, the Gulf of Carpentaria and Torres Strait Islands to Moreton Bay and surrounding Brisbane.
‘Embodied Knowledge: Queensland Contemporary Art’ journeys through the state’s vast artistic landscape, discovering works of art that make visible something of our identity, heritage and history as Queenslanders.
Heather Marie (Wunjarra) Koowootha
Wik-Mungkan and Yidinji/Djabugay peoples / Born 1966, Yarrabah / Lives and works in Cairns.
When Heather Marie (Wunjarra) Koowootha viewed the portraits of Australia’s former prime ministers hanging in the halls of Parliament House, Canberra, she was struck by the lack of First Nations leaders. In response, the artist was compelled to create something that would teach her grandchildren about leaders who have shaped their own Indigenous family, whose connections stretch from Innisfail in far north Queensland to the Torres Strait.
Callum McGrath
Born 1995, Brisbane / Lives and works in Melbourne, Victoria
Callum McGrath’s images of people convening at birthdays or holidaying together have been replaced by pictures of queer memorials and spaces of celebration. The artist deliberately deploys the format of the family photo album to draw attention to the way that kinship in queer communities can be constructed by actively nurturing one’s ‘family of choice’ rather than those tied to you by biological reproduction. McGrath’s use of amateur photography acknowledges that uncovering the past is often an intuitive process that necessitates reading between the lines of archives or searching within unofficial sources. By inserting these monuments within the vernacular format of the family album, he seeks to emphasise how queer stories are too often left out of official history books.
Ethel Murray
Girramay/Jirrbal peoples / Born 1964, Tully / Lives and works in Cardwell
Ethel Murray creates her oversized contemporary bigin by knotting brightly coloured rope to a metal shield structure. Her use of fibre disrupts the clean, symmetrical graphic lines of the original totemic symbology. Coincidentally, the old shield design drawings by her father, which inspired this series of sculptures, were originally rendered on gridded graph paper — a method that has allowed Murray to upscale and translate the line work into this new medium.
Obery Sambo
Meriams of Mer / Born 1970, Thursday Island / Lives and works in Townsville
Obery Sambo comes from a long line of master mask- and headdress‑makers from Mer (Murray Island), home to the Meriam people of the eastern Torres Strait. One of the most well-recognised symbols of the region is the magnificent feathered dhari headdress (featured on the Torres Strait flag). In addition to producing these customary dhari, Sambo creates experimental interpretations of masks and headwear that are often activated through dance by the Meuram Murray Island Dance Group.
Vanghoua Anthony Vue
Hmong people / Born 1989, Sydney, New South Wales / Lives and works in Brisbane and Cairns.
Vanghoua Anthony Vue’s geometric mural and ornate headdress sculptures greet viewers with a cacophony of colour and texture. In the ‘Tape-affiti’ series, the tape’s practical uses in ducting and electrical jobs, or to signal safety issues, are up-ended for purely aesthetic means. The series is inspired by the artist’s heritage, especially Hmong textiles, stitched by women, whose intricate patterns serve ritual purposes and as political identification and are said to originate in a lost written language. The headdresses from Vue’s ‘Hard-hat Devi(l)-(n)ation’ series similarly nod towards the opulent custom of Hmong headdresses. Screwdrivers, paint rollers and plastic pipes are only some of the objects elaborately interwoven atop hardhats in these colourful sculptures. Tools are adorned with sequins, plastic jewels, pompoms, electrical tape, plastic cable ties, washers and bolts.
Moilang (Rosie) Ware
Torres Strait Islander awman (woman) / Born 1959, Thursday Island / Lives and works between St Pauls (Wug village), Moa Island, and Thursday Island.
Artists of Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait) are known to be masters of carving, weaving and printmaking. Using a novel approach, Moilang (Rosie) Ware has defined her practice by handprinting linocut textiles that combine several tiled designs, displayed like long scripts hanging from the wall. These artworks chronicle her culture and social history, repeating stories again and again, etching the narratives into collective memory in a similar way to oral storytelling — passing them on to future generations.
Warraba Weatherall
Kamilaroi people / Born 1987, Toowoomba / Lives and works in Brisbane
Warraba Weatherall investigates museological collections that hold Indigenous human remains and cultural materials from the artist’s Country and surrounds. It records ten objects held in national collections, including a grindstone, modified tree, pigment, stone axe, club, boomerang, shield, and skulls and bone fragments belonging to three ancestors. Weatherall has chosen to cast the original museum records of these objects as individual bronze memorial.
The removal of Indigenous Australian objects and human remains was a well-known occurrence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The breadth of the collection of Indigenous cultural property, as well as advocacy for their timely repatriation to communities across the country, has been an area of debate and research for many decades. Weatherall’s work critiques the integrity of collecting institutions that seek to ‘protect’ cultural objects by keeping them in secure environments. Institutional acts of ‘safekeeping’ separate these objects from descendants and their intended uses.
Justene Williams
Born 1970, Sydney, New South Wales / Lives and works in Brisbane
Justene Williams humorously comments on the desire to ‘climb the ladder’ of the social and economic order. While shop mannequins once served as a material translation of the ideal body, Williams stretches and distorts their limbs so extensively that they almost lose their relationship to the human figure. The artist is not seeking to create an absurd artwork; rather, she draws our attention to the ridiculousness of contemporary capitalism — in this instance, the images created by the fashion industry for voracious consumption.
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‘Embodied Knowledge: Queensland Contemporary Art’ opening at the Queensland Art Gallery from 13 August, is a showcase that reimagines our relationship to our bodies and to our increasingly digital world. Here, we survey a selection of artists whose work features in this vital new exhibition.
Profiling 19 talented artists and collectives, ‘Embodied Knowledge’ is a snapshot of the art being made today by artists connected to Queensland. The exhibition includes projects filled with wit and verve, that play with physical extensions, convey corporeal memories, and show the entanglement of the political within the personal. One striking aspect of the exhibition’s diverse offerings is their material complexity, especially in artworks by James Barth, Meuram Murray Island Dance Group, Ethel Murray, Obery Sambo, Vanghoua Anthony Vue and Justene Williams.
James Barth ‘Gleaming, I’m shown’
The extension of bodily limits within commercial and digital spaces is exuberantly explored in Justene Williams’s expansive installation and in James Barth’s photopaintings. In Barth’s Gleaming, I’m shown 2021 (illustrated), the anatomy of two lounging, plaid-clothed characters seems to mock skeletal norms. The legless figure sitting in the background is paper-thin, while the arms of a figure lying in the mid-ground appear as malleable as plasticine. To create her artworks, Barth first builds virtual worlds and avatars in open-source graphics software, then transfers these images to silk screens and prints them onto boards in varying shades of grey. The layers of wet paint are then brushed to create a blur — reminiscent of the work of German painter Gerhard Richter — that softens the crisp lines of the synthetic imagery. The resulting artworks are a remarkable combination of the virtual and the painterly.
Justene Williams ‘The Vertigoats’
Williams’s The Vertigoats 2021 (illustrated) humorously comments on the desire to ‘climb the ladder’ of both social and economic orders. A vivid array of mannequins — some immersed in the private world of virtual reality headsets — are posed across an expansive gallery wall. Williams stretches and distorts the mannequins’ fibreglass limbs so extensively that they almost lose their relationship to the human body. Lurid, metallic department-store shelving further adds to the vision of hyped-up retail therapy. Reinforcing the vertigo alluded to in the artwork’s title, colourful plastic climbing holds and geometric boulders are dotted across space, in reference to the current vogue of climbing gyms. Williams points to how the fashion and wellness industries advertise themselves as modes through which people can realise their individuality, but which actually engender conformity.
Vanghoua Anthony Vue ‘The Manny’
Three newly commissioned headdresses, from Vanghoua Anthony Vue’s ‘Devi(l)- (n)ation’ series 2017–22 (illustrated), see hardhats adorned with elaborately interwoven screwdrivers, paint rollers, plastic pipes and other objects. These tools are decorated with sequins, plastic jewels and pompoms, electrical tape, plastic cable ties, washers and bolts.
Vue draws his materials from hardware stores to reference the manual labour for which Hmong migrants are often employed in the Australian construction industry. While the intricate design of the artworks nods towards the opulent custom of Hmong headdresses found in the mountainous border regions of Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Laos, Vue’s versions are far more physically imposing than their traditional counterparts, since they play up the sculptural elements of the found objects. As the Hmong people are split across national borders in South-East Asia and the wider diaspora, the question of cultural continuity remains pressing: through his ‘Devi(l)-(n)ation’ series, Vue honors the customs of his Hmong heritage, while also positing a way for these aesthetic traditions to transform and grow in an Australian context.
Ethel Murray ‘Rope bigin’
Also working with extensions of the body and the desire to sustain cultural heritage, Girramay artist Ethel Murray’s work reinvents the rainforest bigin (shield) (illustrated). Historically carved from softwood and painted with natural pigments, the artist employs lengths of orange, yellow, black and white synthetic rope. Expanding on her father’s totem designs, the graphic lines blur and the colours intermingle in Murray’s shaggy renditions. Although they are presented as static objects, the components of Bumbil Bigin Nguma: Remembering my father’s shields 2022 imply the exaggerated movements of the shields, swinging and swaying in ceremony or battle. With this simple twist in materials, Murray reanimates the bigin tradition to engage new audiences.
Meuram Murray Island Dance Group
The Meuram Murray Island Dance Group (illustrated) encapsulates the idea of embodied knowledge in the activation of works through ceremonies that originate on Mer in the Torres Strait. Voice and movement bring the lessons of the ancestors and their totems into the contemporary moment. Obery Sambo (illustrated) is a leading member of the group and a respected mask-maker. In addition to producing customary dhari (the style of headdress that is the symbol of the Torres Strait), his practice has expanded to incorporate his own unique response to Mer legends and medicine men. These are rendered in commercially produced coconut husk, twine, synthetic materials and acrylic paint; and while they may not conform to traditional designs, Sambo uses them as memory props to keep these oral histories active.
These works and artists in ‘Embodied Knowledge’ each highlight how art can be deployed to rethink what cultural continuity can look like, and reimagine our relationship to ourselves in our increasingly digital world.
Ellie Buttrose is Curator, Contemporary Australian Art, QAGOMA
Katina Davidson is Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA
Film Program
In conjunction with ‘Embodied Knowledge’, participating artist Callum McGrath has curated a free film program ‘In Queer Time‘ screening in the Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA from 12 to 24 August 2022.
‘Embodied Knowledge: Queensland Contemporary Art’ is in Queensland Art Gallery’s Gallery 4, Gallery 5 (Henry and Amanda Bartlett Gallery) and the Watermall from 13 August 2022 to 22 January 2023.
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and present and, in the...
