With the arrival of European missionaries to central Australia in the early part of last century the Pitjantjatjara people ceased to be nomadic and settled at Ernabella Mission in the heart of the Musgrave Ranges. In 1948 Mary Bennet established an Art Room at Ernabella where she taught spinning and weaving and rug making.
Up until that time traditional art took the form of drawings made in the sand. These drawings were used to tell stories and explain tribal law. The Ernabella artists relate that the Ernabella walka (a curvilinear pattern) did not originate from these sand drawings but rather from the blackboard drawings and pastels created at the school as far back as 1940. The story goes that one of the teachers at the school asked the students to make drawings, which in translation came out as 'draw badly'. The 'bad' drawings became known as the walka and are now part of the Ernabella tradition. They can be seen woven into the designs of the early woollen rugs.
Today the artists of Ernabella live in a traditional community in the sense that they observe traditional law and still speak their own language (Pitjantjatjara). The walka has remained the definitive decorative motif of this region although the making of wool products was abandoned with the exit of the missionaries and their sheep in the early seventies. The walka has been transcribed onto silk scarves using batik, onto terracotta platters and bowls using underglaze pigments, onto paper in the form of prints and drawings and canvas using synthetic paints. This work is made in what was the Ernabella art room now know as the Art Centre.
There are other crafts practiced more widely among the Pitjantjatjara community and these generally find their way into the souvenir shops all over Australia and the street markets of Alice Springs. Beads were traditionally made from seeds of fruits and berries and were collected and strung onto spun human hair. Today nylon thread is substituted and the beads themselves are highly decorated with brightly coloured enamel paint.
The craft of using a hot wire to burn arced lines into the surface of Mulga wood is known as punu and is also a Postcolonial craft. Punu patterning is used to decorate the surface of mulga sticks to create the features of snakes and lizards. Pitis (containers carved from tree trunks) and the traditional music sticks also carry punu decoration and is a craft that is widely practiced throughout central Australia. Most recently the punu design has been applied to ceramics, prints and paintings by means of fine, curved, black brushstrokes.
Over the years many artists have visited the Ernabella art room bringing with them new materials and techniques to share with the indigenous community. Ernabella artists have attended workshops in ceramics, printmaking and painting throughout Australia and some have travelled to Indonesia to learn batik. These interactions have seen elements of the exotic creeping into their work including the use of bright colours now associated with Anangu Pitjantjatjara art. (Anangu translates as Indigenous people)
'Colours' was Ernabella's second exhibition of ceramics to be opened at the JamFactory in Adelaide. The title of the show goes a long way to describe the Ernabella Artists' love of bright colour. The first exhibition of decorated ceramic platters was shown during the Adelaide season of Wagner's 'Ring Cycle' in November 1998 and with over 80% sold was JamFactory's best selling show to that time. The tourists were in town then, and while noticeably absent in these times of unease most of the 'Colours' exhibition was sold. What was left became part of two different group exhibitions in Darwin and Sydney.
Today the Ernabella artists can be well satisfied with their level of artistic achievement. They have been recently commissioned to design the rugs for the entrance of the new South Australian State Library. In 2002 the organizers of the Womadelaide commissioned Ernabella artists to create the banners and the poster for Adelaide based world music festival. Their work has been shown and sold in Europe and the UK and is part of many Australian public and private collections. The Ernabella walka has emerged as a symbol of the life force associated with the Anangu Pitjantjatjara. Their work is now marketed under the banner of Ernabella Arts Inc and has its own full time art coordinator.
Hilary Furlong is the present coordinator of Ernabella Arts Inc. and is a person with the big picture in mind. A film director and publisher in a previous life she has created a leading role for large-scale commissions that will better fund the art room. Together with sniffing out commissions and promoting the walka as an important art form within the Australian Indigenous art movement she is also broadening the skills of the artists. Many painters, printmakers, potters, basket makers and knitters come to the Ernabella Art Centre each year sharing their knowledge of new techniques and reinvigorating those of the old crafts. The Beanie Festival held in Alice Springs last year for example has rekindled the love of wool spinning and knitting in the community first introduced by Mary Bennett 55 years ago.
I became involved with the Ernabella artists while I was working for the JamFactory in Adelaide in 1996. Stephen Bowers and I had just set up an industrial ceramics workshop that was designed to create small production runs of plates and bowls. Local Adelaide Indigenous artists Kerry Giles and Heather Shearer came in on the project early using underglaze colours to paint on white plates. The interest their work created encouraged me to extend the project out of the metropolitan area and into the bush. Ernabella was my first stop principally because I knew Jenny Dudley who was the art coordinator at the time. She and I had worked together during the early days of the JamFactory when it was still housed in an old factory on Payneham Road. She was very interested in batik at the time and had spent some time in Indonesia researching the art form.
The partnership was established in 1997 under the wing of the new art coordinator Louise Partos and with six artists from Ernabella painting terracotta plates manufactured in the Ceramics Studio of the JamFactory. The success of this pilot project lead to some funding from the Australia Council to create an exhibition of painted ceramic platters at the JamFactory in 1998. High sales and acquisitions by the Art Gallery and the University of South Australia confirmed the success of the exhibition. The pottery work has developed slowly and steadily with ARTSA funding the development of a hand building ceramic workshop for the Ernabella artists, which has lead to the establishment of a pottery in the Art Centre. Part of the impetus for establishing the pottery was to involve the men of the community. While the women had the Art Centre the men had always worked outdoors on various enterprises established by the missionaries but with their departure in the early 1970’s these enterprises have been let go leaving the men with little or no meaningful work.
The Pitjantjatjara elders are hoping that the young men will become interested in the pottery. Recently two potters from Adelaide, Peter Ward and Chris Nobbs (an education officer with the Museum of South Australia), visited the lands with me to help run workshops both at the Art Centre and the local school. So successful were these workshops that an initiative funded by the local school and the TAFE has created a full time position for a potter at Ernabella. A ceramics graduate from the University of South Australia Peter Ward will teach pottery at both the school and the art centre and it is hoped that he can open the door by which the young men can enter the Art Centre bringing with them the pottery skills learned at school. The pottery is a much-needed resource for young indigenous artists of the Ernabella community.
For myself - I will return next year to Ernabella to help complete new work to be on show at the JamFactory during the next Wagner Ring Cycle in 2004. Together with ceramics there will be painting, printmaking, batik, baskets, beads and just maybe some knitted beanies. Will the humble beanie gain enough 'Art Status' in time to be included for the next Ring Cycle in 2004? Well yes. It seems that the Australian National Gallery has recently purchased 20 beanies for their collection.
I began work on the Ernabella/JamFactory partnership as a pottery teacher but with a steep learning curve. I embraced the grandness and the beauty of the landforms of Central Australia, revisiting my work on the geology of Hallet Cove with its great basalt rocks and weathered glacial forms. These landforms pale before Uluru but they were in my own backyard and venturing farther along the coast of the Fleurieu, I made works about coloured sedimentary layers of Maslins Beach and the whiteness of Snapper Point. I learned to understand the peace and harmony of applying thousands of tiny dots to an artwork. For me it manifests itself in the form of making thousands of tiny impressions into the surface of soft porcelain using a steel stylus. The dots I make detail the cast clay forms inspired by the filter feeders of the ocean; sponges, bryozoans and corals that became the next stage of my work on the Fleurieu Peninsula.
