Ian Waldron - Bloodwood Totem

Opening: Thursday 22nd September at 6pm
Seminar 6.30 - 7.00pm with Q&A to follow: Language Learned. Culture Regained - Art, Culture & Language


22nd September - 20th October 2011



Writing is a physical act, and its antecedents began long ago with drawing and painting on cave walls, and with inscribing marks into rocks. Some of the oldest cave art is in Australia, with Aboriginal people inhabiting the south of Australia by 46.000 years ago, while the earliest known remains of modern humans in Europe are only about 35.000 years old. Recent discoveries about the migrations of homo sapiens into the Asia-Pacific area, made through mito-chrondrial DNA mapping and the excavation of ancient sites, show that “we” (as Homo Sapiens) have used both our technologies and our social ingenuity to make the human world, and our tongues to explain it. If the drawing and marks preserved on cave walls aren’t written words, they are certainly prototypes for words. Just as hunter-gatherers must ‘read’ the land, they ‘wrote’ the symbolic presences of their habitat into their shelters and communal places.

The development of written language as an alphabet (by the ancient Phoenicians, for example, more than 5000 years ago) represented a repeatable structure for the spoken word. Writing lost its pictorial qualities since the alphabet was not visually representational but phonetic, based upon the sounds whose combination makes speech possible. Writing systems evolved independently in different places and periods, including Egypt, China and South America, with various combinations of the pictographic (where the smallest units look like something in the world) and the phonological or phonetic (where the smallest units stand for consonants and vowels). The visual dimensions of writing were suppressed in favour of a standardised form where words flow from the page through the eye as mere code, opening up in the reader’s inner ear as speech. Plato was suspicious of the alphabet as a relatively new and dangerous invention (in the fifth century BC) which lessened memory and encouraged deception; and also belittled visual representations as faint or unreal semblances. In the medieval developments of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, God being invisible was judged to communicate not through images but through divine spoken language, making the written word pre-eminent. Painting and drawing increasingly represented the world of appearances, not philosophy. This was only reinforced by the technologies of printing using moveable type. During the Enlightenment, a distinction was drawn between the literary arts which were “centrally involved with narrative because they unfolded in time, where the visual arts proper domain was deemed to be space, and so could not be said to owe anything to verbal language”. The appreciation of painting and sculpture was deemed to involve the sensual entity of taste rather than the conceptual basis of written language. This logic is at the heart of Clement Greenberg’s promotion of painting as a purely optical experience, whose essential quality is its flatness. Text has no place in a painting in this view, except as another kind of surface. It has taken the studied re-appreciation of earlier movements such as Dada to see how one of the important roles of advanced art over the past hundred and a bit years has been to bridge the divides of word and image and create fresh amalgams of the mind’s work with speech and hands, expressing the whole body.

Language is closely linked to music, as music is to dance. Some of Ian Waldron’s paintings include words from the Kurtja language, with the letters represented in subtle shades of colour. The words float within the field of the paintings, playing between visual dynamics and their physical embodiments of the written tongue. The words dance in and out of earshot, each letter becoming a sensual figure, aware of its movement in typographic as well as graphic space. In his interview on the ‘Life Matters’ program on ABC Radio this morning, Ian told of his people’s language not being allowed, banned. And the development now of a dictionary, helping to restore the spoken tradition and keep the language alive. These paintings assert the importance of language in culture. From the phonetic letters we can make our ideas of what the words say. Imagine if there was a sound track with the paintings, and we could to hear the words pronounced, as a sound poem. And some translation to help us understand them, along with the sound of the meaning.

* Richard Tipping 22 September 2011



"Waldron's work is highly individual, and it belies the assumption that Aboriginal art always features dots" K. Strickland, Australian Financial Review 2010

Ian Waldron is a Kurtjar man whose traditional country is located between Karumba and the Mitchell River on the Gulf of Carpentaria. His strong connections to country provide material and inspiration for much of his work.

Waldron won the prestigious Glover Prize in March 2010, representing the first Indigenous artist and the first artist from mainland Australia to win this national award for landscape painting. Back in 1995 he won the Telstra Open Painting Category Award in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. Since that time his works have been included in several nationally recognised prizes including the Archibald, Wynne & Dobell, and acquired into significant public and private collections including the Parliament House Collection and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

The bloodwood tree, a eucalyptus encased in a thick, rough bark, is one of the important species of flora found on the artist’s traditional country. It is a hardwood and often used for making didgeridoos. The tree gained its name from the red sap that flows from it when cut. Strong colour is used by Waldron to represent the various stages of growth and change in the tree through the seasons. Yuaarr is the name for the Bloodwood tree in Kurtjar language.

The title Bloodwood Totem reflects the artist’s desire to explore the relationship between the physicality of the landscape; the cultural beliefs and traditions of Aboriginal Australians; and the loss of language from traditional culture. The Bloodwood is the totem of the Kurtjar clan.

Language Learned. Culture Regained - Art, Culture & Language

Places are limited so booking is essential

Presenters: Adrian Newstead - Gallery Director and expert in Indigenous Art

Ian Waldron - Key Artist

Richard Tipping - Artist, Sculptor & Poet. Tipping is an expert in text in art. His exhibition Off the Page. Poetic Text as Public Art is currently showing at Customs House, Circular Quay until 9 October 2011.

Dr Bronwyn Eather - Linguist and language specialist, with expertise in Aboriginal languages.

Language and culture are integral to Waldron's art practise. The artist does not speak Kurtjar fluently, so his mother impressed the importance of learning the language and keeping the culture, upon him. Words from the Kurtjar language therefore appear in many of the artist's paintings. This is as much to honour his language, as it is a comment about preserving it. Themes of language and lost languages are a strong component of the artist's work.

This seminar brings together a panel of experts who use language and text in a variety of ways to connect culture and language. ‘Language Learned. Culture Regained’ is a theme Ian Waldron has explored through his art practise.

Richard Tipping is a contemporary artist who uses language and wordplay in a contemporary public art context. He is well known for his witty and playful re-interpretations of road signs and many large public sculptures and installations.

Dr. Bronwyn Eather is an expert in Aboriginal languages, as well as Asian, Arabic and European language. She has taught voice studies at NIDA and linguistics at the University of Sydney. She is currently Principal Linguist at Appen Butler Hill Inc.

The panel will discuss how text can be used in art to explore ideas and the importance of language to culture.

RSVP to ensure a seat for the panel discussion.