with Aly de Groot and the Beautiful Beasts

Aly de Groot takes the clichéd sentiment “art is what you make of it”, and turns it on its head: art is what you make it from.

Aly’s art is made of stuff. Lots of stuff. Natural pigments, plant fibres, fishing line, old tyres – in fact, just about anything that can be found or harvested, whether it’s from a tree, a rock, a junk pile or a kitchen sink. Aly uses anything and everything she can to create and design art of both aesthetic and functional beauty. From sculptures to clothing to handbags to abstract photographic experiments, which, she claims, “reflect upon the social, political and personal to mourn the overlooked and celebrate the discarded.”

Aly recalls how she got started, weaving natural plant fibres.

“A broken-down vehicle in 1994 at the Merrepen Arts Festival in Daly River serendipitously made this visit a longer stay. It was in this ‘slow down’ time that my eyes were first opened to the remarkable skill possessed by Indigenous basket makers from the Top End who use a myriad of plant dyes and fibres to make mats, sculpture, bags and baskets.”

The concepts behind many of her pieces are multi dimensional. In a solo exhibition called “Signs”, Aly used box jellyfish as a metaphor for the fragility of marine ecosystems. To drive the point home, she created box jellyfish sculptures made from discarded fishing line – itself a major pollutant and cause of frequent injury and death in marine life. Likewise, her “Dish Pig” sculpture – posing with Aly on our cover – is made from a steel wool scourer and wire, and its name reflects on those who wash dishes for a living.

“The object was a direct response to my surroundings and what was happening in my life at the time,” she explains. “I made it as I had just bought a house and was experiencing mixed emotions of excitement and apprehension of my new found domesticity. I had spent most of my life previous to that living on the outskirts of the city or travelling. Dish Pig questions human concepts of security and our inclination to overlook the magnificence of the mundane – not to forget the endless joy found in washing the dishes which themselves seem endless,” she laughs.

Aly is becoming increasingly celebrated for her work, and since completing her Masters in Visual Art in February has become an art teacher at Darwin Corrections Centre. She has also won numerous prestigious awards including third prize in the “object and sculpture” category of the Waterhouse Natural History Art Award at the South Australia Museum in July, and was selected to represent the Territory at the “Design Island” art and design sustainability conference in Tasmania this year.

Aly’s Dish Pig now resides in the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory’s permanent collection, and features in the current “Beautiful Beasts” exhibition, which celebrates the animal world through artwork. The pieces on show all come from the Museum’s own archive.

Beautiful Beasts is drawn entirely from the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory’s permanent collection, including works by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian artists, as well as Indonesian and Papua New Guinean artists. The Museum hopes to “create a conversation between artworks and across cultures.”

MAGNT will be hosting a variety of activities for all ages over the wet season, including the “Children’s Trail”, a self-guided family activity. Thursdays will host the “Outback Art Tour” through the Beautiful Beasts and Supercrocodilians exhibits, and on Friday mornings, toddlers can get involved in the “Little Explorers” for story time and hands-on activities.

Date and times for all these activities can be found through the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory’s website at www.magnt.nt.gov.au.