Filmmaker Peter Hylands writes about a recent visit to the remote Pormpuraaw Art Centre in Far North Queensland. Here he talks with artist Sid Bruce Short Joe who speaks nine languages, the ninth is English.
Curator and Associate Director of Taiwan Culture and Creative Platform Foundation Antoanetta Ivanovna, resident in Taiwan since 2011, discusses the travelling exhibition Shadowlife curated by Djon Mundine and Natalie King, and its impact in Taiwan where consciousness of their indigenous people is not as developed as it is in Australia.
Thancoupie (aka Dr Thancoupie Gloria Fletcher James AO) was a trailblazer in Aboriginal art, studying, showing and making work in ceramics for many years. Her work was shown nationally and internationally. After many years she returned home to Weipa, and while still making and exhibiting, focused much of her attention on her family, community, land rights and the next generations.
Some artists are often heard to complain about the lack of honest criticism of Aboriginal art. But in such a limited sphere, criticising an Aboriginal artist in formal or aesthetic terms, or at a deeper level, is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Too often, critics play the man and not the ball. Can we handle the truth?
The artworks of Danie Mellor, Brian Robinson and Christian Thompson each draw on archival material for subject matter, for inspiration, and to develop new work that harks back and forward at the same time.
Michelle Culpitt examines the work practice of Northern Territory artist Karen Mills whose paintings are inspired by the string bags made by the women weavers of Arnhem Land. Culpitt writes: "The articulation of her painterly vision is only possible at the nexus of her experience and influences as an Aboriginal woman in contemporary Australia, a place of both deep connection and belonging to country, and also disjuncture and dislocation from a nation in denial of its own history."
Senior Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria Judith Ryan surveys the complex and inventive art practice of Julie Gough who is concerned with "developing a visual language to engage with the unsettling space between conflicting and subsumed Australian histories."
Napolean Oui is a Cairns-based, mid-career, Djabugay artist and a proud advocate of the rainforest art style unique to Far North Queensland. 2012 was a breakthrough year for him, he did a residency at Studio PM with Paul Machnik and others in Montreal, developed new work at Djumbunji Press for a solo show at Kickarts Contemporary Arts in Cairns during the Art Fair, AND sold work to the National Gallery of Australia.