We Are The Old: Ḻuku Ŋurruŋgitj
JUNE 2024
&
MATTHEW ‘TEAPOT’ DJIPURRTJUN
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
MILINGIMBI ART AND CULTURE
On exhibition at
19 Conacher Street, The Gardens
Darwin NT
Phone +61 8 8981 6616
OPENING EVENT
4:30pm Friday 21 June
OPENING HOURS
Tue - Fri: 10am - 5pm
Sat: 10am - 2pm
Joe Dhamanydji, Guku Galinyin' (Native Honey Bee Hive), 2024 (detail), ochre on bark, 106 x 43 cm. Photo: Fiona Morrison.
Imagine a vast and eternal depth filled with the past. Everything that has ever happened to you, your family, and everything you know to exist is held in this space. Now imagine this space as the land you stand on: the many layers of earth that hold the ashes from past fires, the shells and bones from past meals, and the footprints of those that have come before you. In a changing world, it is these buried treasures – Ḻuku Ŋurruŋgitj: the knowledge of the Old People held in the soil – that guide the way forward.
For several years, Joe Dhamanydji and Matthew ‘Teapot’ Djipurrtjun have been the spear-tip of Milingimbi Art and Culture’s Djalkiri Keeping Place and its work researching the vast amount of material taken from Milingimbi now lying asleep in institutions around the globe. As the first mission in the North East Arnhem Land region, the small island quickly became the pre-eminent destination for early cultural research and art collection, resulting in one of the largest cultural repositories of Indigenous Australian material existent today. Both men speak with great pride about reclaiming this material; of the strength they draw from the old and how this drives them to make these things new.
As Dhamanydji explains,
“Here today, we are in that – in the old. In their footsteps, or tracks. We don’t just make something new. We look at the ground. What those Old People did — that’s it. And those old paintings are bringing back our memory to make it new. So we move forward. And when we die there are new shoots coming up. Young Yolŋu are growing and they take over the work — working, working, working and learning from the old. That’s how we get the knowledge. So it’s like that - we are the old.”
This unprecedented ‘bringing back of memory’ has been a watershed for the artists, reinforcing the cultural strength of their practices and – perhaps more unexpectedly – instilling a greater sense of individual creative license. Studying the works of prestigious artists like Tom Djäwa, George Milpurrurru and Dick Ŋulmarmar – the men’s fathers and grandfathers – they have revealed a long tradition of adaptation and modification. Rather than straying from the foundations to keep up with a changing world, it is within the foundations where we find a model for adapting new tools and new ideas into the unchangeable. Of course, Teapot and Dhamanydji remind us that this is not new for Yolŋu, who have long held a sophisticated understanding of the ‘other’ through generations of contact with visitors from the north.
From studying the way their forefathers moved from painting on bodies to bark and reclaimed mission timbers, the men expanded their own repertoires to include new forms and materials. As their forefathers introduced new styles of painting, the men have followed in their footsteps with more lively approaches to composition and technique. In fact, compared to previous works, everything ‘new’ in their paintings – their use of empty or washed backgrounds, the use or exclusion of borders, the revival of ceremonial body paint designs, the expression of singular elements from larger designs, the mediums and shapes they work with and even the tones of their ochres – are all ‘old’ styles and approaches revealed in historic collections. Where the new meets the old, the old becomes the new.
The two men, one “lil-bit young” and one “lil-bit ol”, are both widely recognised song and law men of high degree, with practices born from painting on bodies and producing powerful sacred objects for ceremony. Dhamanydji – the elder of the two – represents the old guard and has created a suite of works shimmering with brilliance and depth. His most complex paintings are ceremonial in execution and feed a sense that in everything there is everything. Meanwhile, for Teapot – the prodigious leader emerged – these works represent his long-overdue public unveiling. His energetic and hyper-contemporary works defy his ceremonial status and explicit emphasis on deferring to the ways of the old. Or as he puts it when discussing his approach, “Ol’ one. Always ol’one”.
Text by Max Moon
Translations by Michael Cooke