Touring exhibition Kurunpa Kunpu (Strong Spirit) shows furniture like you have never seen before
The Manta Pilti collection is imbued with a disturbing beauty: gnarled wooden chairs that appear to have been cut directly from the earth’s crust.
At a cursory glance it is shattered terracotta. An antique piece of ornate terra sigillata pottery with decorative relief and distinctive flexure, dropped to the floor and into irreconcilable fragments. But while the material may be of ancient provenance, its conformation is much more existent: the earth’s crust corrugating and fracturing beneath an increasingly savage sun.
Tanya Singer took the photograph while out searching for the parakeelya flower: resplendent in pink and purple, and once plenteous in her homeland at Railway Bore, on Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands near Indulkana, South Australia. The succulent, however, has become somewhat more elusive in recent times: supplanted by acres of cracked earth, desiccating with unprecedented heat.
“It was my mother’s favourite flower,” Singer explains of the matriarchand fellow punu (wood) carving artist, Sadie. “When I was younger, I used to see a lot more of it but nowadays you never really see it due to changes in climate. It’s gone. Destroyed by heat and the hooves of cattle and camels. That was the main inspiration for the Manta Pilti [Dry Sand] pieces. When the earth dries and cracks open.”
Crafted in collaboration with designer and academic Trent Jansen for the touring Kurunpa Kunpu (Strong Spirit) exhibition, the Manta Pilti collection is imbued with a disturbing beauty: gnarled wooden chairs that appear to have been cut directly from the earth’s crust. The coffee table and cabinet – valued at $185,000 and $148,000 respectively, limited to editions of five apiece – are both constructed with leaves of wood that have been painstakingly sculpted and interlaid to resemble the scarred earth of Railway Bore, with an uneasy darkness gazing back at the viewer through the cracks.
“That texture of that drying out sand is beautiful,” Jansen offers cautiously from his studio in the coastal town of Thirroul, south of Sydney. “Climate change is ugly, there’s not a beautiful aspect about it. But the sand so well captures that story: it is one image but it says everything it needs to say. It’s drying country, it’s increased heat – it’s so hot that the sand is separating and cupping. So we turned our experimentation to trying to find a way of representing or embodying that texture, that idea, in timber.”
Furniture has long been the preferred manifestation of Jansen’s work: pieces of activist design that, behind their aesthetic splendour, harbour a deeply unsettling truth. Awarded the Venice Design Biennial Residency in 2022, he eschewed the obvious spectre of rising sea levels to explore a more silent yet insidious subject: salt.
The very bedrock of Venetian wealth and power, today salt is invading the city’s brickwork and stonemasonry, causing its foundations to crumble as annual floodwaters recede. His resulting work, Magistrato Al Sal Nero (Black Salt Magistrate) explores this brutal paradox and the retribution of nature against industry and greed. The cabinet is fabricated with millions of granules of obsidian glass and crowned with layers of buckled wooden carvings that represent the ubiquitous roof tiles of the fabled Italian city, tumbling down upon the rot of “black money and corruption”.
“One of the main departures that I have actively tried to take from traditional design is the impact that it has on ecosystems,” Jansen explains of a philosophical approach he has coined “design anthropology”. “Designers are the makers of stuff so we are responsible for the material we use in making that stuff and the energy we use in producing that stuff, and the transport fuel we use in getting that stuff around the world.”
Informed by both the Italian Radical and Dutch Conceptual design movements – namely the vehement rejection of functionalism and mass production in the former, and the inextricable connection between the aesthetic and the ideological in the latter – Jansen’s work is also deeply reflective and respectful of country, lore and traditional knowledge.
A “deep listening” of the relationality between people and place.
“I am interested in things that have function,” he furthers. “An abstract object has no base of understanding – it doesn’t come with its own language, its own preconceptions. I think one of the great things about working with furniture is it already comes with context: people know what it is and know what it is for. It has this line through history that people can connect. There is all of this baggage that comes with this typology as they are known, and I’ve always liked playing with that.”
A three-year collaboration between Jansen, Singer and her husband, traditional wood carver Errol Evans, Kurunpa Kunpu took time to manifest, and all three contributors confess to harbouring early doubts that they would find the necessary synergy in practice.
But Jansen’s successful collaboration with Kimberley artist and leather saddler Johnny Nargoodah gave precedence to how traditional crafts could be respectfully adapted for the exclusive world of collectable design. The nascent days of the project saw the trio shift between Thirroul and Railway Bore, nudging at the frontiers of form and practice with the common tools at hand: chainsaws, angle grinders and transfigured sanding belts. Scale, form and perspective underwent radical paradigmatic shifts as Jansen camped in the front yard of the couple’s family home: “As far as the eye can see,” he proclaims with awe. “Thousands of kilometres in every direction.” For Jansen, Singer’s story of the parakeelya flower would prove the harbinger into the entire project.
“This was just a microcosm of the impact of the drying out of that country,” Jansen reflects on the prescient narrative thread of the motif. “There are so many deeper, more concerning impacts that this drying of country has on the potential for that community to maintain connection to that place long term. Strength, protection and resilience are all themes that are running through this work.”
Hand-wrestled prototypes fashioned in the workshop would then move to a computerised numeric control router in Brisbane, enabling the precision cutting of asymmetrical and complex shapes from sustainable American hardwood – walnut, maple and cherry. “Five years ago this sort of work would have been impossible,” Jansen says.
This advanced technological application is indeed emblematic of the very motifs that inform the works: deeply complex natural forms and ecosystems that are responding to human impact.
Born of Djabugay and Western Yalanji country in far North Queensland, Evans’s practice has been passed on through the ancestors. His grandfather, Ron Reynolds, would instruct him in the traditions, crafting totemic shields, spears, tjutinypa clubs and boomerangs: objects of lore and protection.
These corporeal functions meet with the deeply metaphysical in Evans’s and Jansen’s collaboration, Kutiji Chair: two deeply textural shields coalescing as one in a confluence of strength and vulnerability, speaking to the destructive discord between mankind and country.
“Shields are there to protect and we need protection,” Evans explains. “This chair is art, but it’s also an artefact. It is part of our traditional knowledge. But that knowledge is being forgotten. These cultural practices and traditions are important – they keep me humble and calm. Out here on country, everything is clear. You see the changes.”
The husband and wife team are hopeful that Kurunpa Kunpu – which has exhibited at Melbourne Design Fair, Artbank Melbourne and is currently on display at Fremantle Arts Centre – draws further attention to First Nations artisan practice both at home and abroad, with the exhibition likely to now travel on to Asia and the US.
“We’d better hurry up and get our passports,” Singer hollers – to which Evans retorts sardonically: “I don’t even have a bloody birth certificate!”
Kurunpa Kunpu runs at Fremantle Arts Centre until July 23 fac.org.au. All works are available for purchase.
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