Minister for Arts & Museums Gerry McCarthy and Nina Battley, Photography: Glen Campbell

She is one of 34 artists shortlisted for the TogArt Art Award this year. ‘During my childhood living in Indonesia I witnessed the buffalo working the rice fields. When we came to the Northern Territory in 2004 a tsunami hit Aceh and took with it many lives and livestock. Our Territory buffalo came to the rescue. These beautiful horny creatures were trained by buffalo whisperers at Tortilla Flats and sent to Aceh to help rebuild a broken world. At the time I was also starting a new life in the Territory after living for many years in Western Australia. For me buffaloes are a symbol of new beginnings and taking life by the horns. This painting, Tortilla Buff represents a Buffalo family heading to Aceh.

As an artist’, continues Battley, ‘I feel very lucky to be able to visually express snippets of nature, fragments of life or lives, fractions of yesterday’s sorrow, today’s experience and tomorrow’s hope. I embrace combining all these precious elements with my love of color and paint’.

Now in its 4th year, the Togart Contemporary Art Award is one of Australia’s richest contemporary art awards. With a total prize pool of $20,000, the Award celebrates the diversity that makes up Northern Territory art – from Indigenous to non-Indigenous artwork; it showcases the best contemporary art from across a range of art practices and from artists with a connection to the Northern Territory.

The winner of the Togart Contemporary Art Award 2010 will receive a cash prize of $15,000. The Togart People’s Choice Award winner will receive a cash prize of $5,000. ‘Territory contemporary art is influenced by place and culture – with extremes in its physical landscape and weather, to it’s proximity to Asia and its culturally diverse population; Territory contemporary art has a very distinct language equally within the

Indigenous and non-Indigenous artistic communities. The Award embraces this diversity and we have been richly rewarded with the number and the calibre of the works submitted’, says Felicity Green, Togart Award Manager.

The shortlisted works include: paintings, works on paper, photography, fiber work and a range of sculptural works. The Togart Contemporary Art Award is an initiative of the Toga Group. Visionary in concept and development, the Award engages with the artistic community in recognizing and supporting the work of Territory contemporary artists.

The Togart Contemporary Art Award 2010 exhibition will be open to the public on Thu 02 Sep until Thu 07 Oct in the Chan Contemporary Art Space, State Square, Bennett St, Darwin.

Entry is free, open Tue – Fri: 10am – 5pm, Sat & Sun: 10am – 3pm

WHEN WHERE: THU 02 SEP – THU 07 OCT | Chan Contemporary Art Space

Photo: Three Bulpu by Walawun (Kathy) Guyula

It’s particularly special for senior fibre artist Dolly Dhimbura Bidingal who will travel to Darwin for the exhibition and for the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award where she has work in competition, “it’s the first time ever I made anything for an exhibition … I am so excited to go to Darwin and see my work”.

The bathi, bulpu and maats (baskets, dilly bags and mats) in the exhibition are functional artworks into which are woven the campfire stories, the cultural identity and knowledge of their makers. “The artists are committed to using natural materials and colours that come from their own country”. These talented women are also the subject of a new book by Dr Louise Hamby to be released in September. Entitled, Containers of Power: Women With Clever Hands.

“It investigates the complex set of relationships between the works, their makers and users, their functions, their morphology, their manufacture and history. Fibrework is placed within a cultural context of Yolngu cosmology with emphasis on the belief system and relationships of the fi bre forms to other items of material culture.” (Hamby, 2009)

The artists of Gapuwiyak Culture and Arts Aboriginal Corporation (GCAAC) have created their own permanent collection of fibre art to inspire new generations of artists to become involved in fi bre practice as a means of artistic, economic and cultural growth. It is held in their new Culture Centre building which was proudly opened in June 2009 with an exhibition of this collection. Ngurrungu Yolnguwung Mala Djaamapuy

Giant puppets in the Desert Harmony Festival 2009 street parade.

Inspired by the multitude of local talent they saw in the remote territory township and surrounding communities in the Barkly region, residents from Plam perry and Graham Buxton Orchestrated  the first ever Desert harmony Festival.

The yesr was 1989 and  like all great ideas the name came to Pam in the shower. “We wanted the name the celebrated the town’s culture diversity through dance, performance , street parades and Markets, music and art as well as the harmonious environment that Tennant creek residents enjoy” said Pam.

It was without a doubt a major success with Indigenous   brands such as kulumindini and the ironic Tableland drifters joining the local acts over the coming years.

“We thought it would be just a one-off, but the festival proved so popular the following year we thought we better hire a coordinator abd it sort of snowballed from there” said Pam.

Now two decades on the Desert Harmony Arts and Culture festival is the major culture event of the year and come the end of August the community and Barkly Regional Arts, which took over the Festival in 2008, will be moving into top gear to celebrate its 21^st Anniversary.

Festival coordinator 2010 Jacqui Dawborn said this year’s program is jam packed with rich tapestry of events breaking new life in to the community.

“It’s about bringing people together to enjoy and experience the wide range of cultural and artistic activities in a harmonious environment ,” said Jacqui. “Over the nine days visitors are invited to stay and share in the music, film festivals, visual arts, performance, poetry, traditional dance , circus and other festivities.

28th August sayurday night
MANDINKA SOUND two melbourne based west African acts, one africa and Muhanamwe

3rd September friday night
YOUTH PERFORMANCE

4th September Saturday morning
ARTISTS OF THE BARKLY MARKET PLACE
LAUNCH OF BARKLY ARTISTS COLLBARATIVE INSTALLATION

4th September Saturday night
DANCESITE 2010 presented by ArtbackNT

5th September Sunday
FESTIVAL SHOWCASE
featuring local bands from Bakly

by Angus Cameron Image courtesy Peter Eve.

Yolgnu artists Djambawa and Marrirra Marawili, Marrnyula Mununggurr and Mulkun and Liyawaday Wirrpanda were joined by visiting artists Fiona Hall, John Wolseley, Jorg Schmeisser and Judy Watson. Workshop facilitators included printmaker Basil Hall, ethno-biologist Glenn Wightman, anthropologist Professor Howard Morphy and photographer Peter Eve.

The project was designed to create the opportunity for the artists to share knowledge and observations of the natural environment from a range of cultural viewpoints, including the holistic perspective of Yolngu people.

During the first few days at Yilpara, elders and rangers introduced the group to the area. Community leader Djambawa Marawili and Howard Morphy led an introductory walk through important burial grounds and significant sites along the beach, including an immense sand sculpture of Lulumu, the stingray that created the billabongs and coastline.

The visitors were shown important intertidal zones where fresh water combines with salt water, mixing through the flood plains and estuaries that provide the basis of many Yolgnu metaphors and associations for the origins of creation and continuing life. In turn Glenn Wightman, an ethno-biologist with over 20 years’ experience in Northern Australia, collected plant species and discussed traditional plant and animal use with rangers, traditional owners and artists.

While the visitors were out bush, printmaker Basil Hall set up a temporary print workshop at the community visitor centre. The work of the Yolgnu artists contains the enormous strength and power of their forefathers. Each artist is responsible for documenting the stories of their clan. For Djambawa Marawili it is Baru, the ancestral crocodile. The spiritual places of the Baru are the estuaries and flood plains where crocodiles build their nests. Djambawa uses the Madarrpa clan’s traditional diamond designs to represent the story of the Baru. Other artists depicted explicit places, plants and animals incorporating miny’tji, or sacred designs which form the underlying connections and language of the Yolgnu world.

In response, each of the visiting artists depicted the experience in their own way, working with cultural autonomy and individual style. Each artist engaged deeply and enigmatically with the rich coastal environment, spending much time wandering, collecting and photographing.

Finally, the artists spent many further hours at Basil Hall Editions developing and resolving images in Darwin and in their own studios and art centre. The project culminated in an exhibition of limited edition etchings, which will be launched at 24HRArt: NT Centre for Contemporary Art.

“A good way to find out what’s on at the museum is to bookmark our website www.magnt.nt.gov.au“ said Natalie Jenkins, MAGNT’s Acting Education Coordinator. “It is updated frequently with news and events and has an online Gallery which includes some fascinating virtual exhibitions including the Telstra Art Award and the Link Gallery, South East Asia collection.”

“MAGNT’s family program in the Discovery Centre during 2010 will have a science and dinosaur theme.” Ms Jenkins said. “The June-July school holiday science show Science Magic/ Magic Science reveals the science behind some magic tricks and some of the magic of science and is sure to be popular with young families.”

MAGNT exhibition and event program highlights include:

• Science Magic / Magic Science, CSIRO / MAGNT school holiday program 11am and 1pm, Monday – Friday, from 28 June – 9 July.
• 27th Telstra Art Award, opens to the public from 13 August with a series of curatorial floor talks on offer throughout August.
• The Big Draw – Design-a-saur, school holiday program from 27 September – 1 October
• Little Explorers – Dinosaurs, Scales and Claws Weekly for families with young children. October 2010 – March 2011
• Wildlife of Gondwana- December / January – exhibition and school holiday program.

The art sale is organised by the Tiwi Art Network, an alliance of the three art centres on the Tiwi Islands. Hundreds of prints, paintings, carvings, fabrics and ceramics will be available to purchase at community prices.

The art sale is at Tiwi Design Art Centre located at Nguiu, Bathurst Island. The sale opens at 9.00am on March 14th and will run till 1.00pm (with the footy final to follow). Transportation to the island can be arranged with Sea Cat Ferries on (08) 8941 1991 or Fly Tiwi on (08) 8927 4289.

Alternatively, chartered planes can be organised. For further information contact the Tiwi Art Network.

INFO: Tiwi Art Network
T: (08) 8941 3593
E: tiwiart@tiwiart.com
www.tiwiart.com

Kate Sieper and Vicki Kerrigan

One of the incentives behind their travels to Dili and beyond was friend Luke Gosling, co-founder of charity “Life Love and Health”, which help to build and sustain schools, as well as provide residents with safe food and water. It’s to this charity that proceeds from the exhibition will be going.

The Streets of Dili by Katie Siper and Vicki Kerrigan

But Vicki is adamant that the photos shouldn’t be seen to be journalistic. “Kate and I were friends who went to East Timor and while we were travelling around thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we could raise some money for Life Love and Health. While appraising each others’ photos, we had the idea of setting up an exhibition of them – but they’re really holiday shots, we’re not professionals.”

Awesome Atrocity digital artwork by Anna Reynolds

Anna Reynolds saw off 2009 with a bang – her solo exhibition, Amidst the Mangroves and Metropolis was a big hit at DVAA in December, and involved many pieces of 2D and 3D work containing photographic prints, paint, digital imagery and bricolage. But in a new start to a new year, her forthcoming exhibition at 24HR Art – Awesome Atrocity – forsakes the traditional formats in favour of a purely digital process. With subject matter deeply rooted in the contrast between Old Darwin and New Darwin, change and progress, the message and the medium share an uncanny number of traits.

You could be forgiven for seeing Anna’s landscapes as being post-apocalyptic – a city after people have gone and the plants have taken over. But that wasn’t the intention. “I see it as when the people are removing the plants to make way for the buildings. But of course I’m happy for people to make their own decisions about what the work means to them. I’m really impressed when people have these great theories about my art.“

With this exhibition, Anna will herself make the full transition from analogue to digital. Originally a medium format film photographer and painter, the exhibited work in Awesome Atrocity will have been created entirely within the ‘digital darkroom’. “My digital darkroom is an iMac, a beautiful scanner, a Nikon D70 – which replaces the trays of poison, the film, the darkbag,” explains Anna, who now also paints digitally using a Wacom digital drawing tablet. But she’s not beyond a bit of recycling. The works in this exhibition may be digital, but their source imagery comes from a variety of sources, both digital and analogue. Many film negatives from her time living in Dinah Beach in the 90’s, as well as digital photographs of her other paintings were used to compile some parts of the works.

“It’s really exciting working in the digital medium because it’s all so new to me. I only bought a digital camera three years ago. I’ve only had a computer a little bit longer than that. And this show will be all digital (output). I feel like I’m going back to my photographic roots.”

sample from Awesome Atrocity by Anna reynolds

As well as this exhibition, Anna has managed to strike a deal with Nomad Art in Parap, who will be selling limited edition prints of her currently exhibiting works, both large and small, as well as selected original pieces from the previous “Amidst the Mangroves” exhibition.

“This is a real honour for me,” says Anna. “Nomad are usually just a print gallery, but it’s great to have my work from a variety of exhibitions available through one place. Today – Parap; tomorrow – the world!”

Awesome Atrocity by Anna Reynolds sample 3

Honouring the Mothers, Sharon Cook and Bill Brock

Sharon says “After years of doing commission work I wanted to do a sculpture of my own choosing that is significant and would make a difference to people’s lives. Having the perfect stone and hearing of the plight of the Stolen Generation I set about the quest of creating a memorial sculpture in their honour.”

The Aboriginal woman is standing strong and proud holding her healthy son on her hip. She is looking into the future, yet shedding a tear for the past when the children were taken away from their families. She emerges out of a block of local percillinite stone in colours of deep purples, pink, yellow, white and brown – the colours of the country.

Over the two years she was working on the piece, many members of various Top End Stolen Generation groups came to visit Sharon to share their stories, and comment on the work in progress suggesting the appropriate image to express their thoughts, ideas and feelings. This sometimes took Sharon on a painful journey through the lives, the pain and the hopes of these Aboriginal elders, but she found not only a story of loss but also of incredible endurance and strength of spirit.

Bill Brock, a friend and neighbour of Sharon’s, was taken from a loving family on Tipperary Station to Garden Point on the Tiwi Islands. With others of the Stolen Generation groups he wants the statue to find a public place as the Northern Territory’s memorial for the Stolen Generation where it will honour the Aboriginal mothers who lost their children, and bring hope and healing to the children who were stolen and to their families.

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.”

In a solo exhibition called “Signs”, Aly used box jellyfish as a metaphor for the fragility of marine ecosystems.

“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.