Rarrk master
Margie West
After joining the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) in 1978, I started working on their first major exhibition, Aboriginal Art: Past and Present. It opened in 1980 at the World Wilderness Congress in Cairns, followed by the South Pacific Arts Festival in Port Moresby, before touring extensively until 1986. The exhibition featured John Mawurndjul’s magnificent painting Rainbow Serpent (1979), along with barks by his mentors Yirawala and Peter Marralwanga, among others. This was Mawurndjul’s first group exhibition, which introduced him to national and international audiences at the onset of his artistic career. (1)
I next encountered Mawurndjul in 1988, when he was at the peak of his inventive explorations of Ngalyod’s interpenetration/creation of the landscape. This necessitated monumental barks, as he says:
When we paint the Rainbow Serpent and yawkyawk beings and their children and other things, we can’t depict all those elements on a small piece of bark. We made the barks big for that reason, so non-Aboriginal people could see them and understand that the Rainbow Serpent is a large [impressive] being. (2)
Mawurndjul created his first large figurative barks, alongside other Kurulk family members, for the Gunwinggu Artists exhibition in August 1988, organised by Maningrida Arts and Crafts for the first international Australian Rock Art Research Association congress. It was co-hosted by MAGNT at the Beaufort Hotel’s convention centre in Darwin, where Mawurndjul was one of the artists who sang the conference open.
Later, in September, Mawurndjul submitted another major painting, Ngalyod (1988), into the museum’s 5th National Aboriginal Art Award (NAAA; now called NATSIAA, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards). It was almost 2.5 metres tall, with entangled body and landforms sublimated into dazzling fields of shimmering rarrk. It stunned the judge, Djon Mundine, who awarded Mawurndjul the Rothmans Foundation Award for his painting centred on a major Rainbow Serpent site at Milmilngkan. Mawurndjul explains:
A Rainbow Serpent has entangled a young woman who had come down to the water to drink … but the serpent captured her coming up from below and there was nothing she could do to escape. It then pulled her down below. There is a mother and child yawkyawk [depicted]. (3)
This was Mawurndjul’s first national prize and since then he’s entered the NATSIAA ten times and won the bark painting award again in 1999, 2002 and 2016. These paintings capture his creative trajectory from increasingly complex figuration to the all over geometrics of Mardayin-inspired designs that consolidated in the 1990s. It was a thoughtful progression, according to Mawurndjul:
To be an artist, you have to do new things all the time, which is why I experimented with pure cross-hatching to reflect ideas with deeper meanings. As an artist, my body and knowledge changes – I think different things. Besides, I get nightmares if I paint Ngalyod all the time. (4)
Notes
(1) This was followed by Aboriginal Art at the Top (1982), a selling exhibition from various Arnhem Land art centres held at MAGNT.
(2) J. Mawurndjul, interview with M. Garde, 9 March 2018.
(3) J. Mawurndjul, interview with M. Garde, 5 March 2018.
(4) J. Eccles, ‘Mawurndjul refound’, Aboriginal Art Directory, 27 April 2015, retrieved 23 March 2018, https://news.aboriginalartdirectory.com/2015/04/mawurndjul-refound.php.
After joining the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) in 1978, I started working on their first major exhibition, Aboriginal Art: Past and Present. It opened in 1980 at the World Wilderness Congress in Cairns, followed by the South Pacific Arts Festival in Port Moresby, before touring extensively until 1986. The exhibition featured John Mawurndjul’s magnificent painting Rainbow Serpent (1979), along with barks by his mentors Yirawala and Peter Marralwanga, among others. This was Mawurndjul’s first group exhibition, which introduced him to national and international audiences at the onset of his artistic career. (1)
I next encountered Mawurndjul in 1988, when he was at the peak of his inventive explorations of Ngalyod’s interpenetration/creation of the landscape. This necessitated monumental barks, as he says:
When we paint the Rainbow Serpent and yawkyawk beings and their children and other things, we can’t depict all those elements on a small piece of bark. We made the barks big for that reason, so non-Aboriginal people could see them and understand that the Rainbow Serpent is a large [impressive] being. (2)
Mawurndjul created his first large figurative barks, alongside other Kurulk family members, for the Gunwinggu Artists exhibition in August 1988, organised by Maningrida Arts and Crafts for the first international Australian Rock Art Research Association congress. It was co-hosted by MAGNT at the Beaufort Hotel’s convention centre in Darwin, where Mawurndjul was one of the artists who sang the conference open.
Later, in September, Mawurndjul submitted another major painting, Ngalyod (1988), into the museum’s 5th National Aboriginal Art Award (NAAA; now called NATSIAA, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards). It was almost 2.5 metres tall, with entangled body and landforms sublimated into dazzling fields of shimmering rarrk. It stunned the judge, Djon Mundine, who awarded Mawurndjul the Rothmans Foundation Award for his painting centred on a major Rainbow Serpent site at Milmilngkan. Mawurndjul explains:
A Rainbow Serpent has entangled a young woman who had come down to the water to drink … but the serpent captured her coming up from below and there was nothing she could do to escape. It then pulled her down below. There is a mother and child yawkyawk [depicted]. (3)
This was Mawurndjul’s first national prize and since then he’s entered the NATSIAA ten times and won the bark painting award again in 1999, 2002 and 2016. These paintings capture his creative trajectory from increasingly complex figuration to the all over geometrics of Mardayin-inspired designs that consolidated in the 1990s. It was a thoughtful progression, according to Mawurndjul:
To be an artist, you have to do new things all the time, which is why I experimented with pure cross-hatching to reflect ideas with deeper meanings. As an artist, my body and knowledge changes – I think different things. Besides, I get nightmares if I paint Ngalyod all the time. (4)
Notes
(1) This was followed by Aboriginal Art at the Top (1982), a selling exhibition from various Arnhem Land art centres held at MAGNT.
(2) J. Mawurndjul, interview with M. Garde, 9 March 2018.
(3) J. Mawurndjul, interview with M. Garde, 5 March 2018.
(4) J. Eccles, ‘Mawurndjul refound’, Aboriginal Art Directory, 27 April 2015, retrieved 23 March 2018, https://news.aboriginalartdirectory.com/2015/04/mawurndjul-refound.php.
We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land and waters of those venues hosting the John Mawurndjul exhibition on its tour of Australia.