Social Fabric
The Age
Saturday September 5, 1998
THEY WERE sent from remote outstations and Northern Territory islands, arriving in nondescript packages and small padded bags: glorious lengths of silk and cotton decorated with desert animals and Dreamings, abstracts imbued with meaning and with spirit.
They arrived at the National Gallery of Victoria and were unwrapped still smelling of campfires and of the beeswax used to make them. They were folded in layers of tissue and gingerly handled with white gloves while huge partition walls were built to show them off.
The Raiki Wara collection of indigenous textiles has been six years, and many stories, in the making.
The exhibition of 114 hand-painted and printed textiles by 63 Aboriginal and Torres Strait artists is what the gallery's fashion and textiles curator, Robyn Healy, says is the most comprehensive of its type ever in Australia.
The textiles, mostly by women, are decorated with batik, screen-printed and hand-painted. Seventeen communities are represented, each with a distinct iconography.
Healy expects surprise from gallery-goers. This is contemporary rather than traditional art - free-flowing designs in a palette of colors she says is quite extraordinary. Washed-out ochres, delicate sand colors, lilac and pinks are there along with the better-known central desert hues.
There are crabs and octopuses from Elcho Island, dragonflies from the Daly River (NT) community and "intense" works by urban artists in Sydney and Melbourne. There are depictions of sacred sites, traditional lands and stories passed down from ancestors.
The works - some metres long - were produced as "acts of creation" like paintings, without the constraints of some commercial fabric production, says Healy.
Predominant in the exhibition are the batik works from the central Australian communities of Ernabella and Utopia.
Batik requires few resources - wax, a brush or canting (a Javanese instrument like a hollow pen), dye and heating utensils. Equipment is made, recycled or dropped off to the communities from the backs of four-wheel drives.
The process comes from Indonesia - and groups of Aboriginal artists have travelled there - but Aboriginal batik is more free-
flowing and spontaneous than the restrained and repetitive Indonesian version, Healy says.
Batik production began in Aboriginal Australia in 1971 at Ernabella, a mission station in northern South Australia, after a New York artist held a month-long workshop there.
It was from here that the Pitjantjatjara title of the exhibition was taken - Raiki (meaning rag) and Wara (long), forming "long cloth".
The Pitjantjatjara women of Ernabella sit together at low tables in a schoolroom, talking as they work, drafting their designs beforehand.
Sharing the work means that Aboriginal communities often do not know or care about who worked on what - an unusual (and commercially uncomfortable) concept elsewhere in the art world.
The batik process spread to Utopia, an Aboriginal-owned cattle station east of Alice Springs, in 1977, then to other Aboriginal centres and islands in the '80s and '90s.
The Anmatyerr and Alyawarr women of Utopia made shelters to shield themselves from wind and sun, boiled water for the batik in drums and buckets over campfires and heated the wax on saucepans or hubcaps. More recently, they began using electric frying pans.
The women stretch the fabric across their laps to create the distinctively free, abstract expressions.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye's remarkable talent as an artist first showed up in her batik work from 1977 to 1988, at Utopia. Like others, Kngwarreye transferred the designs of body paintings used in special ceremonies called "awely" to fabric. She gave up the medium because the repeated waxing, washing and boiling was too much work, and, like other well-known textile artists, moved to canvas, a more lucrative medium.
Healy hopes that Raiki Wara will prompt a rediscovery of an art form that has taken a back seat to painting and other forms.
"If it was a canvas," she says, unrolling a bolt of cloth decorated by Kngwarreye, "people would jump up and down."
Batik, in the public mind, has the perhaps unfortunate connotations of kaftans, the hippie '70s and tie-dyeing.
There was a brief flurry in the '80s when "everyone was buying textiles", and fashion designers such as Jenny Kee, Robert Burton and Linda Jackson have incorporated Aboriginal designs into their collections, says Healy. (Jackson was so impressed with an eight-metre length of red fabric that she couldn't bring herself to cut it up to make garments.)
Painted textiles are generally regarded as craft (rather than art which is more prestigious) and as women's work (generally less commercial than that of men).
"I think it's got a lot to do with lack of exposure here," Healy says. "It just gets ignored. There's always been a great interest in Japan for Ernabella batik."
Healy, working with the gallery's Australian and Aboriginal art curator Judith Ryan, began acquiring the textiles in 1992 with a group of 12 screen-printed silks from Melville Island.
The two women put the word out that they were buying for an exhibition, negotiating directly with the artists or their advisers. Ryan went to some of the Aboriginal communities.
Many of the works were sent by mail, bought at the asking price or returned if the gallery didn't want them. The remote-control collecting worked. "We just wouldn't have gone to the places where they sent stuff from."
The most expensive work cost the gallery $5000. "Some of the best cost $50 - we thought 'wow'," says Healy. "We were the only people really buying textiles.
"I've never experienced anything like it in terms of enthusiasm - we're still getting the Jiffy bags!"
The Raiki Wara exhibition will tour other states next year and in 2000. In the meantime, some of the artists have travelled to Melbourne to see the works.
Kathleen Petyarre, an artist from Utopia, was visibly excited by her visit, says Healy. But she laughed at the white gloves, she says.
Raiki Wara: Long Cloth from Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait runs from 4 September to 19 October at the National Gallery of Victoria. Entry is free.
© 1998 The Age