HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Helen S. Tiernan uses her art like an archaeological tool, to interrogate, challenge and explore the many layers and contradictions that lie below the surface of contact history.

From her earliest years at Canberra School of art, Helen’s interest lay in narrative, historical, satirical, and romantic art. She began by using the embossed and relief patterning found in decorative interiors, employing wallpaper as a metaphor in validating and acknowledging the historical female domestic experience, including the claustrophobia and repressive control that creative women experienced within the confines of their homes and family and extrapolated this to Aboriginal women in servitude.

In 2014, Tiernan presented Farming Without Fences, her first solo exhibition at Cooee Art. The exhibition was profoundly influenced by Bill Gammage’s ground-breaking book, The Biggest Estate on Earth - How Aborigines Made Australia. The paintings, like the book, explored the contrasting ways our ancient continent has been viewed and ‘managed’ by colonisers and First Australians.

By 2017, Helen had turned her attention to the theme of first contact in the antipodes, drawing upon material that documented the process of ‘transculturation’, during the 235 years since Australia colonisation. Her richly research-based art mined both European and Indigenous archival records from the colonial art of Joseph Lycett to Tupia (James Cook’s Polynesian navigator) to the imagery of William Barak and Tommy McRae.  Her works were alive with contemporaneous references to the writing of  Paul Irish Hidden in Plain View, Bruce Pasco Dark Emu, Bill Gammage The Greatest Estate on Earth, and art historian Ian McLean, revealing the intimate knowledge of, and deep connection to, Country.

The exhibition, Transculturation - Sublime & Surreal Encounters of First Encounters in the Antipodes, featured three major works about Cook’s adventures in the Pacific and the role played by his Polynesian navigator Tupia. All three were acquired by the National Maritime Museum.

In this latest exhibition, Helen S. Tiernan has been inspired by the ground-breaking international touring exhibition Songlines - tracking the seven sisters. Foremost amongst a number of other influences have been The Memory Code, written by Lynne Kelly, thus the exhibition title, and Alison Page’s Clever Country.

In this exhibition Tiernan’s landscapes are cultured spaces, repositories of ancient knowledge and deep memory. They are storied with Songlines and Tjukurrpa and inflected with the moralities arising from mythology that reminds us of how values and identities are formed.

By re-digesting and transforming history through her own creative process Helen S. Tiernan challenges us to revisit and re-interpret it. Her works present us with Songlines that are richly multi-layered post-contemporary insights into what it means to be a truly cognisant Australian.

- Adj. Professor Margo Neale | Head: Centre for Indigenous Knowledges, National Museum of Australia Senior Indigenous Curator National Museum of Australia