Traditional themes mine new materials

VISUAL ARTS: Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards. Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, until December 19.

Gunybi Ganambarr

THE two important indigenous art exhibitions unveiled in Darwin and Perth last week are evidence of the diversity and breadth of modern art practice.

As the more recent entry into the field, the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards had to identify a point of difference, and is presented as a series of focused mini-exhibitions of major artists recommended by curators, dealers, critics and members of the community.

The exhibition, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, is an orchestrated selection of 16 artists, each given the opportunity to present up to four works. It is a show with depth and focus.

This is nowhere more evident than in the work of Jan Billycan, who won the $10,000 award for a WA artist. One of her sumptuous paintings of her country along the Canning Stock Route would be a treat. With four, you begin to see the way she thinks, the linkages across works that track her country and the dreaming stories that give it form and significance.

When the viewer is confronted with a group of her canvases, the sense of a journey, or multiple journeys undertaken and then retraced, becomes clear. It also reveals her increasingly sophisticated control of her medium as she modifies her application of paint from layered stains to thick impasto to facilitate her narrative.

The mini-survey approach also enables us to see how Gunybi Ganambarr's work has evolved from traditional bark painting and hollow-log coffin carving to an innovative use of new materials.

When Ganambarr was a young man, senior Yolngu artists recognised his ability and ensured he had the skills and knowledge to create the extraordinary bark paintings on show.

These wonderfully complex and technically brilliant barks sit alongside new works that exploit the potential of materials found around mining sites. Using the layered webs of lines fundamental to traditional Yolngu painting and the incising of lines that characterises Yolngu carving, he has reclaimed the insulation panels and rubber belts discarded by miners and transformed them into panels that combine traditional image-making with an enhanced sense of visual depth and tangible space.

Ganambarr's work epitomises the innovative and exploratory nature of contemporary Aboriginal arts practice and not surprisingly the judges awarded him the $50,000 main prize.

Curator Glenn Iseger-Pilkington visited artists in their communities and studios around the country to follow up the recommendations he received.

This rigorous curatorial oversight has paid great dividends in the exhibition's cohesiveness and focus.

Extremely diverse bodies of work, ranging from Reko Rennie's stencilled wall painting to Nyapanyapa Yunupingu's "light paintings" and Gary Lee's photographic exploration of masculinity, have their own integrity within the larger showcase of the exhibition.