Exhibitions Opening Thursday 14th December 6 - 8pm
While opening simultaneously, simultaneously, each Exhibition is its own body of work, created entirely independent of one another. Still, the parallels are striking. At surface level, both artists depict bodies of water, each of them deeply significant to their respective history and connection to Country.
The artists’ respective subjects - the Maranoa River for Currie Nalingua and the Arafura Sea for Bonson - act as containers of memory, personal and ancestral. For Joanne Currie, the river links back to childhood, “growing up living on the banks of the Maranoa river at the ‘Yumba’ (East Mitchell Aboriginal Settlement)”*. For Bonson, the Arafura sea connects his home in Darwin to his ancestral Country in the Torres Strait.
In both cases, the subject offers a fleeting self portrait in the water’s reflection, like an ever-moving and refracting mirror, containing within itself a history that reaches back generations. As the viewer, we are invited to participate: Bonson leads us charging over the tumultuous Arafura sea on the back of his totem, the saltwater crocodile. Joanne Currie invites us to the bank of the Maranoa, where we may kneel and lean out over the water, as far as we can before tipping over; briefly we glimpse a reflection in the rippling surface.
