[MUSIC] I am Judith Ryan, senior curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. In contemplating contemporary indigenous art, the indigenous art movement that we have been witnessing in Australia for over a century, but has been gathering momentum only from the 1970s onwards. We should be mindful of the fact that indigenous visual culture is the longest continuous art form on the planet. It extends for over 50,000 years and prior to contact by Europeans, it's locust was primarily ceremony and it was largely ephemeral and seen only by the initiated. In 1971, following the great work of Bark painters and sculptors in Arnhem land in the Tiwi Islands which laid the groundwork for what was a great revolution in indigenous art, senior male artists at Papunya were the first to transfer the original designs on to small sheets of composition board. That is, they were rendering visible what had only before being seen on the ceremonial ground. Women at that stage were not given access to any European materials, or given an opportunity to paint. In central Australia, indigenous women own and execute their own designs. They are responsible for managing their own ceremonies and they are custodians of law and also are regarded as traditional owners of country with a responsibility to nurture the land and also to look after family, familial relationships, bringing up children and ensuring the increase of the natural environment. Before the Papunya work happened, Aboriginal art in Australia was looked at as artefact belonging to an anthropological discipline, a curiosity perhaps, something that did not deserve to be considered as equivalent to other forms of contemporary art. It was trapped in a sort of the essential-ism of Ochre and it was considered not to be therefore, the manifestation of an individual artist's work or ideas about painting or about the world or, it wasn't really dignified as art. What happened with the Papunya Tula paintings was that they were looked at as examples of contemporary art and they didn't seem to accord with bark paintings or sculptures. They were not works that had been made for use in ceremony, they were not in natural ochre, and it was about and also they were largely geometric, seemingly abstract and composed of a myriad of tiny dots. It is interesting to remember that dots form an important part of the iconography of men's ritual language, painted on shields, on cave walls, used on the body and on the ground. So, they are very much a part of men's business. From seeing the dots in Papunya Tula paintings, a pejorative term emerged dot painting. But the dots were there really as a heightening of the designs which signified the marks or traces of ancestral beings in our mythological geography tracing their journeys from place to place in the Jukeopa, the ancestral period or dreaming. When we think about dreaming, it is a word that is almost impossible to translate. It actually means, it refers to an ancestral past but during this ancestral past, the rules that govern human behaviour for indigenous people were laid down and also, their languages, sacred designs, narratives, ritual songs, dances were actually created and bequeathed to the descendants of ancestral beings. So what we are looking at is a continuity between past, present and future. There is a sense in that the dreaming is uncreated by human beings. So if an indigenous person looks at a part of the landscape, it might be a rock or a place of living water, the belief is that this water has been created by the actions of ancestral beings in the Jokepa, and therefore, this space partakes of the spirit essence of that ancestral being. And the spirit of the indigenous person also comes from a particular place in the landscape to which that person will return when they pass away. So there is this continuous life cycle that Aboriginal people believe is the most important thing in their world. I think we need to look further at the position of women in indigenous society, and also the emergence of women as artists. It was not until the mid 1980s that women had their first opportunity to work as artists in their own right and this revolution was initiated really in the Warlpiri community of Yuendumu and at the same time, Lajamanu and the Kukatja community of Balgo. Women here were given an opportunity to transfer their ritual designs on to board and they also in discussion with men, gained permission to use dots in their paintings because as I explained initially, dots belonged to men. Women's designs are linear or striped. So, when women began painting at Yuendumu, Lajamanu and Balgo, 1986 is really the cut-off date that art centres were formed in these three places, their work was different from men's paintings. In lots of ways, they tended to be more adventurous with colour and form and often, their works were about their responsibilities to country, and were less formal than those of men, but it really wasn't until Emily, Cara, and Laura working at Utopia made the transition from Batik to canvas that a change occurred in the way their paintings were perceived. Because it only took one canvas of Emily's, there were 81 exhibited at the SH Irvine Gallery in Sydney. Small 2 by 3 feet canvasses, they were all given 81 of them. Emily's was reproduced on the cover and on it her women's linear designs were covered by an all over field of dots which obscured any figuration. There was no circle path meander which was the predominant iconography of Papunya men's painting and what was happening at Yuendumu or Balgo. Instead the world, that is curators, collectors, saw this one work and a mania developed because they wanted to see more of it. At that time, Emily's practice really took off, and she was given larger and larger canvas and her work became associated with other forms of contemporary art practice, abstract expressionism, minimalism, pointillism, you name it, she's been compared with. But of course Emily has absolutely no knowledge of any contemporary art movement. She lived and worked in Central Australia near her father's and grandfather's country and her attention was solely focussed on this subject matter which was her right to paint, to speak for, to sing and dance in ceremony and so on. [MUSIC]
