2012年9月20日星期四

Tales both handed down and taken up

When Yukuwa went on view a month ago at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award exhibition in Darwin, it dominated the main gallery. How austere it was, and how majestic! It had a technical finesse and delicacy not seen before in bark paintings of such scale: it was steeped in tradition, yet its aesthetic was modern, it was intensely of its time. The piece won the dedicated prize for paintings on bark, a regional specialty of the Yolngu people of northeast Arnhem Land.

The artist herself was present. She stepped forward to speak on the opening-night stage. "I am Yanggarriny's daughter," she began -- and for aficionados of this art form, that was the key. Her father Yanggarriny Wunungmurra won the main NATSIAA prize in 1997 for a large, precisely balanced bark painting that depicted slender ancestral figures set against the diamond emblems of his Dhalwangu clan. Djirrrirra Wunungmurra had learned at her father's side; she helped him in the execution of his prize-winning work. Yanggarriny Wunungmurra painted at remote Gangan settlement, and he painted Gangan's stories: stories of the creator beings whose presence is still felt in that stringybark forest, and in the winding river channels of the region and its shining waterholes. He died there soon after he won his great prize, and is buried there -- and his daughter lives at Gangan to this day.

"He taught me well," says Djirrirra Wunungmurra. "I began to learn,Browse the Best Selection of buy mosaic and Accessories with FREE Gifts. and to help him, when I was just 16."

She was already painting barks and exploring ways of re-creating Gangan's world in paint when her father was still alive.HOWO is a well-known tractor's brand and howo tractor suppliers are devoted to designing and manufacturing best products. One of the subjects that he gave her to record was the fish-trap area of the Gangan river, a place known as Buyku -- a site in the landscape, but also the key design motif of her clan: a motif she rendered in classical fashion as a field of intense, finely detailed diamonds, on bark and on poles of stringybark. All her trademark elegance was in the work from the outset: her love, too, of building up impressions from the smallest reduplicated details. She made maze-like works that summoned up the tangle of the fish-trap but hinted, too at the cascade of metaphors the ancestral Yolngu story held.

Will Stubbs, the co-ordinator at the Buku-Larrnggay art centre, has turned over Wunungmurra's work in his thoughts for many years,This page list rubber hose products with details & specifications. and has set out a brief explanation of the way bark paintings of sites as freighted with significance as Buyku might communicate their meaning to outsiders. "Each drop of Dhalwangu clan water has the Dhalwangu life force etched within it," he writes. "The design holds that essence." Hence the need for detail and precision in the painting; the pattern lays claim to the place, it proclaims the essence of the artist, it proclaims, too, that the place and the water there will hold the essence of the painter when that person is no longer in corporeal form. Wunungmurra's rhythmic "Buyku" works were quickly noticed when they went out into the art world. In 2008 she won the first prize in the TOGA art award, an open contemporary art show staged each year in Darwin.

That was when the vexation started. Who was she, a young woman, from her section of the clan group, to be painting that great theme, to be painting the key segment of the Dhalwangu river and its hieratic emblems? There was muttering within the community: it was petty jealousy, not an unfamiliar feature of remote outstation and homeland life.

Wunungmurra was outraged. She knew who she was. She was Yanggarriny Wunungmurra's daughter. She was the heir to his tradition. She left Gangan in protest, and took up residence in new country, in the Djapu clan's freshwater homeland of Wandawuy. There she stayed a few weeks, and brooded, and developed fresh resolve. Why shouldn't she paint, and paint what she wanted, and excel? If her detractors didn't want her painting the Buyku, she would paint her own identity, not her clan design. She would paint herself.Sinotruck Hongkong International is special for howo truck. And what was she? Many things, for all Yolngu have a nested set of names: surface names, deep names, power names. One of hers was Yukuwa, the name of the winding, twisting yam-plant of the forest country.Visonic Technologies is the leading supplier of rtls safety, She would paint the yukuwa, and make its design, and announce herself. Any objections to that?

And so it began. She went back to Gangan, quiet, determined, and looked around her, at the new styles of contemporary bark painting just then being explored for the first time. She saw how wide the possibilities had become. The rules -- the background rules of traditional painting -- were still very much in force, but you could be flexible within the form now, and you could paint objects, not just symbolic emblems -- on condition they were the right objects, imbued with the right tonality.

Wunungmurra prepared a set of white-clay covered barks. On them she began to trace out the yam vine's curving pathway, and found, at once, a beauty in the pattern of leaf and stem, and a capacity, too, for endless fine-grained modulations. "Sometimes," she says, "I paint one way, sometimes differently, changing the leaves, moving them round, painting up, then down, and it looks different.

"Sometimes I draw the plant going up and the leaves heading down, to make a change, sometimes they point only one way."

From the first these new works stood out: they looked very much like renaissance floral intertwinings on tapestries, they made a sharp appeal to Western connoisseurs. Keen-eyed gallerists like Melbourne's Vivien Anderson quickly realised that something striking had happened: here was Yolngu art that spoke directly of the interlacing beauties of the natural world. As always, though, with work from northeast Arnhem Land, things weren't quite that simple.

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