Bloodwood Totem
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
languageâ€. 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.
