Modern Aboriginal art is dense with symbolism and narrative. A Carlow show of contemporary works is an eye-opener, writes Aidan Dunne
Just over 30 years ago, the RDS hosted a huge retrospective exhibition by the Australian painter Sidney Nolan - later Sir Sidney Nolan. His paintings gave iconographic form to popular Australian mythology, to the stories of Ned Kelly and explorers Burke and Wills. At the time, his most recent, kaleidoscopic works, featuring plant and animal patterns, seemed to nod towards Aboriginal art, but only indirectly. Now, in a way, Jalanguwarnu, currently at Carlow Institute of Technology, tells the other side of the story. It is the largest show of modern and contemporary Aboriginal art ever seen in Ireland, and it is something of an eye-opener.
Among the 30 works in the show are bark paintings, paintings on canvas and fibre and wood sculptures. Many of the canvases are vibrantly colourful and one of them, Karrku is huge. Some are startling in their apparent affinity with aspects of western abstract painting, their assured grasp of minimal design. The bark paintings adhere to a more muted, limited palette. They are beautifully graphic and linear, and their intricate, banded patterning is extraordinary.
The wood sculptures are spirit carvings, stylised and figurative, with great presence. There are also two funnel-shaped woven forms. Elegantly sculptural, they would once have been purely functional fish traps.
Meanwhile, in the Chapel of the Presentation Convent in College Street, one of the leading younger Aboriginal artists, Fiona Foley, has made an installation entitled Beyond the Sea. Foley's grandfather emigrated from Co Waterford to Australia, and her installation includes a list of some of the names of those on the first ships transporting Irish people. She takes us on a symbolic voyage parting the waves through a sea of poppies - for remembrance - to a Celtic cross.
The work at the Institute includes pieces by the best-known modern Aboriginal artist, Emily Came Kngwarreye and by a noted younger artist, Samantha Hobson. It is all drawn from the Kluge-Ruhe Museum at the University of Virginia, which holds the largest collection of Aboriginal art outside Australia. One of the surprising things about the work is how easily we can appreciate a great deal of it in terms of a western aesthetic. Of course that is only a small part of the story in relation to meaning and cultural significance. As Dr Margaret Smith, director of the Kluge-Ruhe, explains, Aboriginal art is dense with layers of symbolism and narrative, and intimately linked to the history of Aboriginal engagement with the land.
Surveying a group of canvases she says: "All these paintings are landscapes. They are about the land in numerous ways. From the Aboriginal perspective, the idea of land entails an area that you own with other people with your clan, your descent group. There is collective ownership of the stories that go with the land, and artists are limited in various ways in what they can do with specific areas and specific stories. In making Karrku, which involved more than 20 painters, there was a lot of negotiation about the ownership of the stories and who should do what."
Smith is an anthropologist who became interested in Aboriginal art when she was working in Central Australia in the early 1990s. She went on to devise and teach a course on indigenous Australia. "All the work in the exhibition emerges from two traditions, both essentially ephemeral in nature, the practice of body painting and of sand drawings and sand sculptures. The systems of marks and the stories used carry through to the paintings." In traditional Aboriginal society, art serves various functions. It is implicated in social rituals, an important means of preserving group identity, a way of teaching about the past and, in a vitally utilitarian way, the land, and it is always a way of evoking the sacred.
The stories told in art refer back to The Dreaming, the complex, transcendental mythological system that underlies Aboriginal societies, determining, for example, vital aspects of status and identity in terms of kinship and moieties. In other words, every picture not only tells a story, it is positively layered with information that can relate to The Dreaming, to factual, historical events, and to the resources tied up in the landscape, to bush tucker, ochre, water and so on.
"People tend to look at a particularly colourful Aboriginal painting and describe it as expressive," Smith cautions. "In fact, it has nothing at all to do with how you feel, it's not expressive of emotion. It is knowledge-based. Yet it allows ample scope for individual inventiveness and initiative. Rather than merely repeat a fixed pattern, an artist will listen, learn, draw everything together from various sources and come up with his or her own version. A painting is like a dissertation. You learn and borrow from numerous sources but you come up with something new."
We can look at one of the Pintupi Spear Straightening paintings - there is a fine example in the Carlow show - and see it as an exercise in cool minimalism. Its vocabulary of horizontal stripes, delivered with impassive expertise, seems right at home in such a context. But looking at it in these terms, we know we are approaching it at one remove. Of course it enriches our experience of the painting to learn that its subject is the arduous pre-battle ritual of straightening spears by heating them over a fire and applying pressure, treated in a highly stylised pictorial way. Yet it is no betrayal of the work's cultural meaning to admire its formidable abstract design properties.
Most of the art on show in Carlow departs from a strictly traditional framework in that it was made for widespread public consumption, sometimes on commission. Something exceptional happened in terms of Aboriginal culture in the latter part of the 20th century. A long-developing political consciousness and growing activism began to win grudging recognition, and the provision of various rights - from state and federal authorities - for Aboriginal communities. While, earlier in the century, from a European perspective, Aborigine art had been viewed in terms of historical ethnography, things had begun to change by mid-century, when art museum curators began to incorporate Aboriginal works in their collections and exhibit them. This burgeoning awareness, together with the growth of cultural self-confidence, contributed to something of a renaissance in Aboriginal art. That is to say, significant strands of it avoided the fate of some indigenous art, that of being westernised or reduced to anodyne pastiche designed for the tourist market. Without compromising its nature and its core values, it managed to accommodate traditional qualities and contemporary realities. Not surprisingly, given that Aboriginal culture had been severely undermined and repressed for a long time, a great deal of contemporary Australian art shares an international preoccupation with the politics of identity.
Foley, for example, is one of a generation of artists who established their reputations by facing these issues. Some of her early work dealt expressly with atrocities committed against her own Fraser Island people in a way that respected traditional practice. Jalanguwarnu is an exciting introduction to an Antipodean renaissance.
Jalanguwarnu - Aboriginal Colour and Flair is at the Carlow Institute of Technology, Kilkenny Road, Carlow, and Fiona Foley's Beyond the Sea is at the Chapel of the Presentation Convent, College Street, Carlow. Both run until August 29th, daily from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.