CONTEMPORARY INDIGENOUS SCULPTURE

Contemporary Indigenous Sculpture



Contemporary Indigenous Sculpture

Imaginative and captivating, Melbourne Museum's current exhibition, Menagerie, brings together thirty three Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander artists - a mix of established and emerging - to explore the concept of animals as storytellers. Where the animals of the Dreamtime stories are usually portrayed abstractly in painting, here they have come to life, crawling and writhing across the floor of the exhibition space. The animals on display here exist in a totally magical realm. They are at the same time carriers of tradition and examples of the great diversity and fertility of contemporary Indigenous arts (Barnhardt, 2005, pp. 8-23).

Greeting the exhibition explorer is a group of seven woven stingrays, floating effortlessly on an invisible wave. Created by Kunwinka artist Frewa Bardaluna, the rays cast charming shadows on the platform below. To their left, the gaping mouth of Yvonne Koolmatrie's Pondi (Murray River Cod) is the doorway to a fat belly full of generations of stories. A little further along the exhibition is Hella by Vicki West, a Tasmanian Devil with an aggressive, teddy-bear from the wrong side of the tracks attitude. Made up of roughly stitched together pieces of bull kelp, Hella is an enthralling piece of work (Ball, 2004, pp. 454-479).

One of the most impressive pieces in this exhibition is a pair of bronze and aluminium stingrays that wrap seductively around each other. The work of Dennis Nona, of the Kal-lagaw-ya people, is delicately engraved and is almost like an oversized piece of fine jewellery. Nona has been a recipient of a NATSIA Wandjuk Marika Prize for 3D art, and in fact several other winners have been brought into this exhibition, notably Laurie Nilsen who brings his barbed wire emu, a kind of "reincarnation" of the giant birds the artist has seen killed by this kind of fencing. Also here is Janine Macaullay Bott, who brings her fiercely protective frill-neck lizard Noongar to this curious collection of beasts (Nicole & Brian, 2009).

Over his short career, Kunoth Pwerle has developed a skilful sculptural shorthand for depicting birds, which often relies on no more than a few brief incisions to indicate wings, tails or beaks. Unlike Brâncusi, who saw the reductive process as a means of capturing the essence of the image, in Kunoth Pwerle's work this process is used in deference to the unaltered natural medium. Carved from the soft wood of the bean tree (erythrina vespertilio), it is the medium (rather than the image) that dictates form, allowing the natural object to express itself in a totemic intensity (Battiste, 2002). Not only does this enable Kunoth Pwerle to exploit a boundless, naturally occurring variety of forms; more importantly, it offers a distinctly Indigenous metaphor for the connectedness of all things. The figure and the form are united, not in opposition, but in a holistic union, with obvious parallels to the poetic mythos of the Dreaming. The birds are literally returned to the branches as the figure returns to the form; the object ...