Kylie Waters, Land and Language, writing book and soil, 2002
Since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1997 with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Ceramics, my journey with clay has led me to my most recent body of work created for a Master of Visual Arts by Research at The South Australian School of Art. This new work investigates the complexities of interactions that took place between indigenous people and German Lutheran missionaries at such places as Ntaria/Hermannsburg Mission in Central Australia . The study uncovers dialogues and cross-cultural exchanges that led to shifts in understandings of indigenous Australian cultural practices. It also explores the creation of a place and a cultural space that was occupied by both Lutheran missionaries and indigenous people.
Whilst I predominantly used clay in this body of work to refer to indigenous cultural practices, to the land, to media, and to the practice of pottery introduced by the Lutheran missionaries and mission workers at Hermannsburg, I have also used other significant objects that have been in the Heidenreich family for generations, linking past and present. This most recent body of work has particular relevance to my personal history, not only as an artist, but in terms of my genealogy. I am a descendant of GA Heidenreich who was the first Superintendent of Hermannsburg Mission. He was sent to Australia from Gemany in 1866, to be the pastor at a place called Bethany in South Australia and later to establish the mission in central Australia on behalf of the Lutheran church. Despite this being part of my background and experiences, I am not Lutheran and do not have a religious background. Rather, my family history was a stimulus to wider research.
When I was about thirteen years of age, my grandfather first told me about GA Heidenreich, who was his own grandfather. Grandpa told me that "he used to stay a lot up at Bethany " with his grandparents because his father had gone to Germany to study. He also told me that when he was up at Bethany , the kids got around with no shoes or socks on because that's what they did "up north" at Hermannsburg. My grandfather subsequently worked on the railways in South Australia for a large part of his life, and during the 1920's and 1930's he established a collection of indigenous Australian objects which he donated to The South Australian Museum in the 1980s.
During my honours year in 2000, the focus of my work was on the Australian landscape as a spiritual resource. As part of this reasearch I attempted to learn more about Aboriginal art and culture and the influence of Aboriginal people's relationship with the land on non-indigenous artists in Australia. It was during this year that I was rummaging around through 'old' stuff in a cupboard at my parents' house when I came across three message sticks. I had never seen these before and wondered why they weren't with the rest of the other objects at the museum. As an adult looking back through things given to me by my grandfather when I was a child, such as an old German writing book, a handwritten letter from Bethany (dated 1893), two pages of newspaper type information from Hermannsburg in Germany (dated 1893), an old wooden ink box, I began to question what the role was that the Lutheran missionaries played in changing the understandings of indigenous Australian visual cultural practices.
Sand and soil, red iron oxide and yellow ochre were also used in my work. In Recollections (of Namatjira) these materials, along with crushed clay, are found within a number of plastic snow domes. I wanted to use these media because they are used in traditional indigenous cultural practices, and are also colours from an indigenous landscape (Isaacs, 2000). The use of snow domes makes reference to the art and craft that was created by Aboriginal people at Hermannsburg as a response to the extra tourists visiting the mission in the 1950s. In the past many non-indigenous people believed that indigenous Australian art and culture were unchanging, and this is represented by how the materials enclosed in the snow domes appear not to be able to move. However, over time such past perceptions of Aboriginal art and cultures have shifted, as does the sand and soil, red iron oxide, yellow ochre and crushed clay when the snow domes are picked up and shaken.
The change in understandings of Aboriginal art was also the theme of another piece of work called Zum Andenken in which I used a German tea cup and saucer that had been in the Heidenreich family for generations. In looking at how the interpretation of these objects had changed from when they were originally acquired in Germany, I was able to respond to the shift in understandings of indigenous Australian art and culture. The cup holds a layer of soil underneath a layer of red iron oxide and yellow ochre which is symbolic of the underlying meanings and inferences regarding what took place between the Lutheran missionaries and Aranda and Luritja peoples.
Through exchanges between the Lutherans and indigenous people, documentation of indigenous Australian languages occurred. On one hand this meant that indigenous traditions and histories were recorded, but in some instances it also led to a denunciation of cultural beliefs and practices. I was interested in specific accounts of such documentation at Hermannsburg, and developed a piece of work Sand in which I use the nineteenth century wooden ink box and glass ink wells that were given to me by my grandfather. The inkwells hold sand and soil, making reference to Aboriginal sand sculptures, stories and marks made in the sand. Prior to the arrival of the Lutheran missionaries, the land was their teacher and classroom, and oral traditions were an important and integral part of this education. I was also interested in how the Lutheran missionaries transferred the information they received from the indigenous people into published material, moreover, how they transformed what was essentially an oral language into script. In using a German writing book from Bethany in South Australia from the early 1900's, with sand and crushed clay upon it's open pages, I created another piece of work titled Land and Language , which explores how the presence of the Lutheran missionaries and their form of teaching and education led to a huge shift in cultural practices.
Exchange, consisting of two unfired clay blocks with and unfired clay building form in between, also examines this shift and the relationship between the Lutheran missionaries and the Aboriginal people. Space/Place, which consists of a number of ceramic forms covered in mixtures of slip, leaves, grass and sand, references the textures of whitewashed stone buildings made by the early Lutheran missionaries at Hermannsburg. Some of the forms have had a white slip applied to the surface, which gives them a sense of being cold and strange, just as the historic buildings at the mission may be seen in an indigenous landscape.
During my research I was influenced by a quote by Dianne Austin-Broos, she writes, "the Lutherans brought new forms of knowledge, but also received from the Aranda" (1994 p, 141). This led to the creation of Cultural Exchanges , a series of lengths of fabric onto which I have applied flour, tea, sugar and slip. Despite the flour, tea and sugar being introduced materials to the indigenous population, the colours and their horizontal positioning evoke a landscape. Interactions between the Lutheran women and the Aboriginal women, and the commercial art/craft activities such as sewing and embroidery, were also a focus of my work. Such interactions were important sources of exchanges of information and traditions. Thread(s) consists of a black cape, lace trimmed and hand tailored, once belonging to the wife of the GA Heidenreich, suspended over a layer of dried and cracked slip. This piece highlights the work undertaken by the Lutheran women, and creates a focus on the space between the cape and the slip, which symbolises a dialogue (even though it may be in a rather threatening way). This work illustrates the new space created between cultures and how this was explored through introduced visual art practices such as pottery, crafts and watercolour landscape painting.
References
Austin Broos, Dianne. 1994, "Narratives of the Encounter at Ntaria", Oceania , Vol.65, No.2, pp 131-150.
Isaacs, Jennifer. 2000, Hermannsburg Potters: Aranda Artists of Central Australia , Craftsman House, Sydney .
