Carly Lane

Unmasking the hidden history of colonial Western Australia

tanya.sticca@artgallery.wa.gov.au — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 05:48:09 +0000

Unmasking the hidden history of colonial Western Australia

Christopher Pease b. 1969, Minang/Nyoongar Reaper 2015 (detail). Oil on muslin on board (42 panels), 168 x 294 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gallerysmith, Melbourne.

tanya.sticca@a… Mon 06/07/2020 - 1:48pm

7 January 2020

From an early age Western Australian artist, Christopher Pease displayed a talent for the arts. His mother Sandra Hill and brother Ben Pushman are also well-known Noongar artists with works included in many significant collections including AGWA, Janet Holmes à Court Collection, Kerry Stokes Collection and the National Gallery of Australia.

Trained as a graphic designer, Pease dabbled in art throughout his studies and later while working in hospitality. It wasn’t until 1999 that he produced his first serious painting titled Noongar Dreaming. This painting depicts Australian Rules football great Graham “Polly” Farmer’s nephew Peter Farmer standing on the Perth freeway which bears Polly’s name.

Another significant piece of artwork by Christopher Pease titled Reaper is currently on display in AGWA’s WA Journey Gallery as part of the Foundation’s annual appeal. Made up of 42 panels, this impressive artwork relays an important message about colonial Western Australia and its darker history.

AGWA’s Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Carly Lane hosted a live Q+A with Christopher about his work.

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Artist Christopher Pease with AGWA’s Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Carly Lane.

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Carly Lane: So, Reaper; what is it about? In twenty-five words or less.

Christopher Pease: In twenty – I don’t know if I can do that. When you’re an artist you find yourself looking back a lot. When you’re a Noongar artist, you’re always looking back. The first references came from my family; my mum, my aunties who would tell stories. After that, you look at the artwork that maybe other people don’t. Like Revel Cooper, I love his work. Then I was going into the museum archives, looking at artefacts and for Noongar iconography specifically, to find a Noongar visual aesthetic. I was trying to build my own visual language and then I stumbled across the Louis de Sainson prints.

Carly Lane: Who is Louis de Sainson?

Christopher Pease: He was a French watercolourist and draughtsman on the ship Astrolabe which sailed down to Albany in 1827 for a couple of months, and he did some really interesting stuff. There was a lot of early colonial artists that did work that I kind of was interested in because there was no photography and there is this translation that occurs. So, the drawings are made here, and then they go back to London where they’re turned into an aquatint, an etching – a lithograph and so there are sometimes weird things that happen in the translation. You don’t know exactly what’s real, and what’s accurate and what’s not accurate, so I’ve seen a lot of kind of questionable things. Robert Dale’s piece was the big one.

Carly Lane: Who is Robert Dale?

Christopher Pease: Robert Dale was a British Lieutenant who in 1829 arrived at the Derbarl Yerrigan (the Swan River) on the HMS Sulphur, and he ended up being the assistant surveyor to John Septimus Roe. He did a lot of surveying and was involved in projects all throughout Perth.

Carly Lane: He was about 19.

Christopher Pease: Yes.

Carly Lane: But had already built up this skillset.

Christopher Pease: Yeah, his skills were amazing. In 1832 he was in Albany, from January to May and during this time he wrote the account of King George’s Sound and did a series of sketches on top of this hill looking south overlooking King George’s Sound, and that was a panorama. The original panorama is three metres long, it’s a really beautiful lithograph – coloured lithograph – and I wanted to tackle that for years, like really early on, but I just didn’t feel confident in doing it. Finally, a couple of years ago, maybe four years ago now, I thought “That’s it, I’m going to tackle this work.”

Carly Lane: I feel like there’s a bit of déjà vu, because I do want to tell the audiences that we recently had the panorama that Robert Dale drew, and Robert Havell printed up in the Botanical: Beauty and Peril exhibition, and there was another work by artist Sohan Ariel Hayes that was a response to that print that was in the show as well.

Christopher Pease: Yeah. So, Robert Dale, at the same time that he was down in Albany, so was Yagan. Yagan was a cultural warrior here in Whadjuk territory and at the same time, the grants were being opened up in Perth. You’ve got private land ownership happening on the Derbarl Yerrigan, on the Swan River. There was an odd series of events that led to Yagan killing William Gaze. Yagan was caught and sentenced to death, but an outspoken settler named Robert Lyon convinced the judge to send him to Carnac Island instead. He ended up going to Carnac Island and then he escaped by boat back to the mainland. He later appeared at Lake Monger, doing Gidjee (spear) demonstrations, throwing, dancing, and also, in the Perth Botanical Gardens he was involved in events as well, so he was kind of given this kind of unspoken pardon, I guess.

Carly Lane: Julie Dowling, her painting titled Yagan 2016, talks about that event or, you know, it depicts the event at Lake Monger where he was throwing spears.

Christopher Pease: Yeah, yeah, they – they were, you know, throwing targets. You know and there’s a big article in the Perth Gazette where they remarked how amazing he was – Yagan was – his prowess in throwing, you know, weapons.

Christopher Pease b. 1969, Minang/Nyoongar Reaper 2015 (detail). Oil on muslin on board (42 panels), 168 x 294 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gallerysmith, Melbourne.

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Carly Lane: From what I understand about your most recent exhibition Minang Boodjar, it was a series of six paintings that all looked at King George Sound, and the Dale and Havell Panorama.

Christopher Pease: Reaper recreates the first part of the panorama and there’s a lot of interesting things happening in it. And there’s a lot of the things Robert Dale depicts in the panorama that is quite accurate. In the background, so you can see in the top right prescribed burning that was happening, so yeah there was a lot of prescribed burning. We can see in other parts – in the painting – there was possum hunting. So, some of the things that he was depicting were quite accurate. What happened was in 1833, Yagan was caught trespassing up where I used to live up in Swan Valley near Ellenbrook. He was caught trespassing and he was shot by two brothers, beheaded, and his head was put in a tree and smoked. Robert Dale ended up acquiring the head and in 1834 he went back to London where he looked to make a deal for Yagan’s head. It was during this time he met Thomas Pettigrew, who was a surgeon working in London. He was an antiquarian and he made a deal with Robert Dale for Yagan’s head. Pettigrew would host dinner parties in his home and after dinner, he would display his curiosities to his guests and Yagan’s head was part of that. As a souvenir, each guest was also given a print of Robert Dale’s panorama.

Apart from the back story, there’s obviously the lines in the painting that’s actually the real map of the exact area where the drawings took place and that relates back to Robert’s Dales work as a cartographer and surveyor. I decided to divide it up to represent the cutting up the land and putting up boundaries. The reaper is the reference to death and if you look at tarot cards it also means change which is quite significant for that period as well. It was a fitting image that works well with what was happening at the time.

Reaper is currently on loan and we are asking for your help to give it a permanent home in the State Collection. Find out here

Donate by contacting our Foundation office on +61 8 9492 6761 or email foundation@artgallery.wa.gov.au

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AGWA Collection

AGWA Foundation

Christopher Pease

Carly Lane

Indigenous art

Painting

AGWA

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Curating in Australia

Phoebe — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 09:08:14 +0000

Curating in Australia

Image courtesy of Short St Gallery, Broome, WA.

Phoebe Tue 30/06/2020 - 5:08pm

2 July 2020

AGWA Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Carly Lane is one of the editors behind the publication Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice. This book investigates international Indigenous methodologies in curatorial practice from the geographic spaces of Canada, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia. We're delighted to share this excerpt from the book, outlining curatorial practices specific to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. Becoming Our Future is due to be published in Australia this August.

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Six Seasons gallery, AGWA installation view, 2020. (L-R) Vernon Ah Kee born in this skin 2008. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased through the Friends of the Art Gallery, 2008. © Vernon Ah Kee. Courtesy Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Vernon Ah Kee therewasafall 2015. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 2016. © Vernon Ah Kee, 2015.

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Who We Are

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curators working in Australia are a small band of passionate advocates and lovers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, art, and culture. We are fully aware of the power of curating to express ourselves, our mob, our culture(s). We use our curatorial spheres of influence as arenas for cultural expression, renewal, and survival. We write and create exhibitions that define and present us as we individually and collectively know ourselves. We work tirelessly alongside artists to hear and see ourselves in the public domain and to educate the wider public about the importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. Our art holds significant value as a form of cultural and political expression, as well as being the first arts of Australia, a fact that is gaining traction in narratives of nationhood. And, sandwiched into all of this activity is our agenda to ensure that Aboriginal and Islander people, as human beings, are seen as inherently deserving of equality and respect, as much for our differences as for the things we have in common with wider (white) Australia. Too often Australia operates as a binary society of mainstream/marginal, male/female, black/white, which inevitably categorizes one group as lesser than the other and completely overlooks the various third spaces of coexistence. It is within this social context that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curators, and other First Nations curators working in Australia such as Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoa, Pārs), attempt to secure a better position for our peoples, both now and into the future.

Carly Lane, Bethany Wheeler and Geraldine Henrici assisting Eva (Joan) Nagomara, Helen Nagomara and Jane Gimme digging for bush potato near Wirrimanu (Balgo), 2017.

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In Becoming our Future, authors and curators Freja Carmichael, Nici Cumpston, Carly Lane, and Kimberley Moulton present just some of the projects that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curators have initiated or helped to shape. As Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people we differ in age, gender, and language group, many of us hailing from one or more of the 250 (plus dialects) language groups across Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. We use various names to refer to ourselves, including Indigenous, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and First Nations, as well as the names of the language groups to which we belong. As curators, we span at least three generations of professionals, with each generation bringing its own passion, knowledge, and sensibility to the ever-growing field of Indigenous curatorial practice.

Where We Work

While many of us work in public institutions, such as museums, art galleries, and at festivals, which are mostly located in capital cities, there is a growing cohort of curators working independently or as curatorial fellows within major private collections. There are others still in regional and remote community art centres whose curatorial practices are beginning to be recognized as an important part of their working lives. This recognition is a recent phenomenon, representing a conscious shift in how we define a curator and curatorial practice today. The sites of culture we work in are almost everywhere: whether an Aboriginal owned and operated art centre, a university, private collection, or at all levels of government—local, regional, state, national, and sometimes international. Indigenous curators actively advocate for the importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and material culture, and we do so with the implicit support of our institutions and colleagues. To varying degrees of success, we each reshape our curatorial roles beyond the standard remit of researching, collecting, and communicating art in society, to one that also incorporates social justice and self-determination.

Fiona Foley HHH #1 2004 (detail). State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia⁣⁣⁣⁣. Purchased through the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation: TomorrowFund, 2009⁣. © Fiona Foley, 2004.

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Methodology

In my experience, and with the exception of curator and scholar Stephen Gilchrist, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curators only occasionally examine our own curatorial practices. We are so busy storytelling, writing, and buying and exhibiting works of art that we do not take the time (or cannot afford it) to critically review the methodologies we bring to our daily work. If we did take the time, I wonder if we would categorize our curatorial practices as both conventional in structure and organic with undetermined rules. More often than not, we make our own way on the job, observing and taking in the practices and skills of those around us. We intuitively build our practice by doing what feels right, guided by our Aboriginal world views. Our curatorial methodology is an extension of our cultural ways of seeing, doing, and being in the world. But this may not be the full story of Indigenous curatorial practice in Australia.

Stan Brumby (dec) paints at Yarliyil Art Centre, Halls Creek, 2012.

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While culture offers curators a lens through which to see and protocols for how to engage, there are likely other factors that forge and fuel our individual methodologies and practice. When reading the essays by Carmichael, Cumpston, Lane, Moulton, and Eshrāghi, we ask the reader to consider the roles of passion, place, and people, and also the present as a marker of both the time and the activity the curator is engrossed in. What do I mean when I talk about passion, place, and people? By place, I mean geographical location, the site of culture and the micro and macro environment a curator works in. By passion, I mean the specific purpose or mission that drives a curator’s practice. By people, I mean the subgroups the curator speaks in and out to. Where is their focus? I suspect these factors are essential to understanding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curatorial methodology today.

Note: Australian territory stretches across the traditional lands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people(s). Although Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and culture are distinct from one another, we jointly share the position of being the Indigenous/First Nations people of Australia. Together, we make up 3.3 per cent of the Australian population. Furthermore, according to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies there were over 250 Aboriginal languages and 800 dialects once spoken across Australia.

AGWA Six Seasons

Aboriginal art

Torres Strait Islander art

Carly Lane

Curatorial practice

Carly Lane, AGWA Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

Card Text

AGWA Curator Carly Lane outlines curatorial practices specific to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art.

Excerpt from Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice (ARP Books)