John Patrick Kelantumama
Jinani 2001, earthenware

The exhibition, Yikwani: Contemporary Tiwi Ceramics presents contemporary ceramic works and photographs of contemporary life from the indigenous communities of Bathhurst and Melville Island to contemporary Melbourne audiences. Sizable earthenware ceramic works were assembled within the Victorian architectural décor of the National Gallery of Victoria’s temporary site on Russell Street.

The Tiwi works were constructed from slab and coil techniques. The artists used underglazes to produce smooth painterly surfaces of textured cross-hatching, lines and dots. These ceramic works presented an appearance associated with modernist superficial doctrines of ‘primitivism’ and ‘expressionism’. These auratic objects met the insistent demand for authenticity with painterly, expressive gestures and iconic, ritualistic forms. They are figures of fascination capable of returning the gaze.

The works on display possessed a mysterious ambiguity associated with iconic works and ritual. Objects and abstract surfaces become figurative faces, animals and people in relation to sacredness and the uses of land and sea. John Patrick Kelantumama produced a figural-facial totemic embodiment of Purrukuparli (2001) and his son Jinani (2001) - sacred figures which influence the relationships between fathers and sons and practices of hunting and fishing. Mark Virgil Puautjimi also depicted Purrukuparli (2002) the hunter father of Jinani and husband of Bima.

The surfaces of these figures are complex systems of cross-hatching, lines and dots which produce the effect of three-dimensional rhythms and visual analogues. The artists cut openings in these figures with effects of disembodiment. The body is composed of openings in relation to the outside. These objects and their surfaces signify rights to songs, to myths, to land, to sea and resources. Kelantumama’s Tongulaka (2001) is a closed object depicting two figures in the canoe which he states are ‘used for fishing, hunting crab, turtle, dugong and travelling from camp to camp’. Cyril James Kerinauia’s Hunting Party (2000) shows several men in a truck. The figures and truck are covered in blue and yellow cross-hatching in a kind of weave.

Jock Puautjimi, Bima 1999, earthenware

The reception of contemporary indigenous ceramics contains inherent contradictions which implicate the audience in privileged cultural paradigms of value. The Tiwi artists produce work in a climate which privileges aboriginal painting and the artistic authority of aboriginal authenticity as valued commodity forms. The possibilities of craft and ceramics are frequently devalued and misunderstood in the dynamic between intuitive work and analytic work. These works of the hand are present in a cultural milieu saturated with simulated technological forms. The relationship of the past to the present is filled with displaced objects. The works exhibit ambiguity between objecthood and sculpture, art and artefact, painting and decoration. The Tiwi ceramics are formal, cultural and material objects arising out of conditions of historical struggle. The Tiwi artists transform tradition when faced with the demands of contemporary audiences and the art market. These objects take on a fetishistic aura as they circulate in the space of economic exchange and cultural value.

Throughout the exhibition, there were several demonstrations by the artists with discussion and dialogue. The significance of these encounters went beyond their function as publicity events. They helped counter the tendency to idealize and devalue indigenous art as a cultural trope by offering a personal dialogue.

The ambiguous meaning of the works confront the contemporary viewer with the possibilities of familiarity and otherness, nearness and distance, intimacy and strangeness. These ceramic works express a kind of mystery and terror amidst the crisis of contemporary Australian culture struggling with the implications of reconciliation, boundaries and outsiderness.