Four Clans – One Canvas – Waralungku Arts, 2020 a – Fine Art Reproductions – Fine Art Quality Print – 1189 x 770 mm –

Artist:

Fine Art Quality Print – 1189 x 770 mm – 2021

Fine Art Reproductions – –

1189 x 770 mm

High Quality Fine Art Reproduction on Archival Cotton Rag Paper.

Four Clans – One Canvas – Waralungku Arts, 2020

Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Marra, Gudanji

Many great visions are conceived on the veranda of an art centre.

In the height of the dry season 2019, senior artist Jack Green called upon trusted Elders to float an idea “…..one really big painting, all the clans working together to tell their stories about country.  Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Marra Gudanji…..all together”

Tribal Elders Dinah Norman, Jemima Miller, Mavis Timothy and Peggy Mawson Yabu agreed that this was a vision worth pursuing, and through Waralungku Arts the journey began. This collaboration was a first for Waralungku Arts, and represented so much more than just a painting – it was (and still is) a potent symbol of the strength of collaboration and shared vision.

Like most visions that are driven by passion, the story was a compelling one. Catching the wave of that passion McArthur River Mine, Community Benefits Trust came on board as the principal sponsor.

The painting developed in the art centre over many months, with the journey being as valuable as the destination. Around this canvas, stories and knowledge were shared, relationships were strengthened and young people came together with old people to learn and grow, and feel proud.

Elders took up their rightful place in ensuring cultural protocols were preserved; and artists worked organically to fill the canvas with their knowledge and imagination.

Approaching this painting as a viewer it is important to read the work as an artistic expression of country, culture and stories. Memories, dreaming’s, histories and aspirations are all explored in this work.  It was never intended to be an accurate ‘mapping’ of country, for indeed it is so much more than that.

The painting does quite deliberately draw on both tribal culture and European map drawing to depict the land, regions and outstations around Borroloola; but always with the expansiveness of imagination rather than the constraints of topography.

Cultural ceremony, stories, and historical events are recorded in ways that (like any great artistic expression) move freely between the past and the present, between the physical and the metaphysical.

Moving visually around and across the canvas you will explore a great many things – an ocean full of sea creatures and dugong hunters, a dreamscape of mythological stories, a land of rivers, ceremony, and song. The layers of meaning in this painting are many, and invite a richness of conversation for which the artists are well known.

To all those who contributed to this work, their extended families and their future generations, the value of this work is without boundaries. With the painting phase now complete, attention turns to storytelling – the possibilities created here are limitless.

Contributing Artists and Elders:

Dinah Norman

Jemima Miller

Mavis Timothy

Jack Green (& daughters Jacky & Shauntrell)

Benjamin Ellis

Colleen Charlie

Rhoda Hammer (& Grandson Debandro)

Kendrick Douglas

Marlene Timothy

Maria Pyro

Katrina McKinnnon