Robyn Djunginy and Karen Mills. Curated by Fiona MacDonald 24 July to 28 August 2010
Paintings by Robyn Djunginy and Karen Mills share an unforced but incidentally profound mediation on weaving as the artistic underlay and support for Indigenous values and culture. One artist has lived a traditional life in central Arnhem Land, the other lives in Darwin. Their works suggest cultural intersections and the process of hybridization: objects and their representation encompass both negative and positive space, disclosing and withholding. This change of state—twining and untwining—is continuous.
Robyn Djunginy is renowned for her paintings and woven sculptures of Morandi-like bottle forms referring to a site of the honey ancestors located near the Ramingining township and, more pointedly, to discarded grog bottles. As Djon Mundine, the former Bula'bula Arts Centre curator, put it in the Biennale of Sydney catalogue, ‘The Everyday’ (1998) this is ‘chianti-art’ with teeth.
In Djunginy’s slow paintings everything is precise, nothing is superfluous: vessel forms float in fields of cross-hatching aligned at right angles, similar to the warp and weft. These gradually transform from utilitarian or sacred vessels, depending on context, into allegories about a state of being. A discarded bottle becomes an abstract form and something miraculous.
Karen Mills’ paintings also explore weaving as abstract painting and as parables wherein threads disappear into a state reminiscent of organic landscape or absence. The loop stitch technique commonly used by Aboriginal women to make bags from bush string is a metaphor for identity and its processes of connection and disconnection, birth and disintegration. Mills’ paintings, however, reference both Indigenous weaving and the memory of her adoptive European mother’s hand-knitted woollen clothing.
While Karen Mills’ white on white paintings hauntingly speak about her return to the Northern Territory seeking her Aboriginal birth mother and her cultural heritage, the serial nature of her installations tip their hat to contemporary abstract art, from On Kawara to Katarina Fritsch’s knitworks.
As art and craft demarcations loosened in the 1990s, the outstanding fibre forms created by Djunginy’s generation of women were re-evaluated in landmark shows Re-coil (co-curators Margie West and Karen Mills, 2007) and Floating Life (Queensland Art Gallery, 2009). This is Karen Mills’ first Sydney exhibition.
Robyn Djunginy belongs to the Ganalbingu group. Her brother and sisters, fellow weaver Elizabeth Djutarra and painters Dorothy Djukulul and George Milpurrurru, have also appeared in previous Sydney Biennales.
Presented in association with Bula’bula Arts Aboriginal Corporation, Ramingining.
