Vibrant collection

By Shezna Shums

The artworks in this Balgo collection are very colourful and convey the energy and dynamism of the culture of the mainly Kukatja language speaking artists at the Warlayirti Artists Art Center in the Balgo Hills region. Their unique creations are on display at the J.D.A Perera Art Gallery till 2 March to give Sri Lankans a taste of their difference.

Consisting of contemporary paintings and etchings, the exhibition also presents a range of stories that demonstrate the strong connection Aboriginal people have with their traditions and the ways in which they are being maintained today.

Balgo is produced by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in conjunction with Artbank, the Australian Government’s art rental program. All works are sourced from the Artbank collection and Artbank is also making its expertise available to present the exhibition for this international tour.

The exhibition offers a riot of colour and energy while exploring in depth the stories, history and lives of these extraordinary artists. The pieces comprise of significant artworks from the Artbank collection including an important suite of prints by senior Balgo artists expressly acquired for the show. Artists include most of the most respected Balco painters, already acknowledged as stars by the international art world and some of the exciting new generation of emerging artists.

For the artists from the Balgo, paining is not a mere rendering of a place, but is a social interaction performed through time and space, and is more much iconic than narrative.

Based on symbolism and effect, the icons of Balgo are more fluid than the signs used by indigenous people from other nearby linguistic groups, and often signify several things at once.

A semicircle may represent a windbreak or hill or a camp or pinched more into a U shape, may represent the people who gather there. Balgo iconography comes in part from ritual or religious sources as they are transferred to bodies or ceremonial objects, or from rock paintings found in secret male and female sacred sites. Indeed, the gender of sites and the division of ceremonial activities along male and female lines is an important aspect of the iconography available to artists.

All of these and other symbols which relate to anything from bush food like walku (bush apple), tjirrilpartja (bush carrot), kantilli (bush raisin) and more, to current events which become integrated with ancient places, from the basis of Balgo painting.

Most directly, paintings and their attendant symbols come directly out of traditions of sand paintings or sand drawing, and from body paintings where skin in marked up for ceremony with lines of alternating light and dark dots.

To the Kutjungka people there is a real relationship between the ground and the body, and as the land is seen as sentient and conscious, its features are comparable to the features of the human body. It has been said that the ground is the focus of indigenous life, as the place on which one sits, rests and walks. The ground has always been the place that Kutjungka people drew in, making marks (kuruwarri) that anticipates lines of paint, telling stories about hunting and gathering, or recalling ancestral journeys and recognizing dreaming sites.

Sand drawing stories are like songs, leading participants through a process of learning, recognition and re enactment, and part of initial is learning to recognize the key features is a song or signs in the sand.

These signs reappear in paintings, in turn becoming enmeshed, for initiates, with deeper meanings about the ancestors, their deeds, and how they metamorphosed into the hills, trees or rocks that are signified.

Warlayirti Artists are known for their vivid palettes and planer geometric compositions. That said, their art is communicative, not decorative. The art is abstract, but not in the sense that the word is used in relation to western modernism here, abstract is used in a much older sense of the term, as a concept or schema for what is known to be in existence.  

The Australian High Commission presents Balgo, contemporary Australian Art from the Balgo Hills. The exhibition is open till 2 March at the J. D. A. Perera Gallery.

Pix by Upul Abayasekera