The Cross Art Projects. Artist Exhibition, Debra Phillips, A talker’s echo. 2023

HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

As told by artists Diana Wood Conroy and Bede Tungutalum

Opening Saturday 18 March, 2pm
With guest speaker Djon Mundine OAM

Exhibition runs 18 March — 14 April 2023

Conversation: HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints

Djon Mundine OAM, Ace Bourke (Hogarth Gallery) and Prof Diana Wood Conroy. Saturday 18 March, 2023

“This is the story of Tiwi and white people working together in the early years, telling how it all began, beginning the Tiwi Design Art Centre.” — Bede Tungutalum

 

It all began in the late 1960s, when two Tiwi artists, Bede Tungutalum and the late Giovanni Tipungwuti co-founded the Tiwi Design art workshop under the aegis of the Catholic mission at Wurrumiyanga (then Nguiu), on Bathurst Island. In a workshop set up underneath the Old Presbytery, the pair experimented with woodblock and linocut prints which developed into silkscreen designs for fabric. They were inspired by emerging Inuit and related First Nations art movements in Canada, part of a global First Nations art network that reached across to Papua New Guinea, Nigeria and the Arctic lands of the Sami people. Like their international peers, Bede and Giovanni were artist emissaries fluent in ‘both ways’ — European Catholic and traditional Tiwi culture and art. As this exhibition testifies, Tiwi art is strongly abstract and symbolic, combining animal imagery with cosmologically significant circles, dots, crosshatch and diagonals.

This momentum generated what we now know as the art centre movement. In 1974 the old, neo-colonial policies of assimilation and integration were challenged when the Whitlam Labour government, responding in part to the civil rights and Homelands movements, introduced the goal of self-determination, which particularly encouraged the growth of community arts organisations in Northern and Central Australia.(1)

Whitlam-era policies helped to resource and strengthen the arts centre movement. Diana Wood Conroy (DWC) and her painter and art teacher husband Joseph were young ‘project officers’, dispatched to the Tiwi Islands by new initiatives at the Australia Council. DWC had been an archaeological illustrator at the British Museum, a textile designer in Italy, and a weaver of commissioned tapestries in Sydney.


Artworks in the exhibition are selected as ‘then’ (circa 1974), and a small but revelatory selection of ‘now’ works by Bede Tungutalum and DWC. These include Bede’s linocuts and a lithograph, printed by Thomas Goulder at Duck Print Fine Art Editions in Port Kembla for the 2015 MCA exhibition Being Tiwi. These are held at the University of Wollongong, with some of the edition available for sale.

Transmission
Over centuries, Tiwi art was influenced by significant sojourners, particularly the Makassan fishing fleets who practised ‘peaceful reciprocity’ through regular, seasonal trade visits. White people came first as buffalo hunters, followed by anthropologists and missionaries from 1911.

Art historical research now turns on the question of ‘voice’ to counter our near-genocidal history of colonial policies. As an archaeologist, DWC is keenly attuned to the idea of layering fragments and voices, while Bede insists that “We must remember art and traditional life.” This exhibition honours this enduring cultural conversation and is part of the Cross Art Project’s ongoing commitment to archival activism.

 

Bede’s largest print Murtangkala (printed 2015), is an image of the blind old woman who created the Tiwi Islands. Murtangkala is the eldest of three sisters from Arnhem Land, who made the Tiwi Islands: its people and sustaining, law-giving ceremonies. The repeating designs in the textiles and prints all stem from this foundational narrative and associated ceremonies.

Kulama and Pukumani are ancestral initiation and funeral ceremonies that directly transcribe a design language. Tiwi women and men play an equal role in ceremony. Pukumani is elaborately choreographed, and Tutini (funeral poles) and Tunga (painted bark baskets) are intricately painted to intertwine with kinship and relationship to Country.

Tiwi art relates directly to these complex ceremonies. Tiwi Design textile printing is noted for its vibrant abstraction and repetition, particularly though all-over patterning on cloth. Printing on fabric demanded changes to traditional methods and materials—shifting from gleaming red, yellow, white and black ochre, to being able to print fabrics using dyes in the full colour spectrum.

In the 1970s, ‘when it all began’, entrenched art world demarcations held sway – craft/art and Primitive/Modern. Aboriginal art was acknowledged as “contemporary” in the 1979 Sydney Biennale, however to some extent art museums and galleries still validate the distinction between tribal and individual. The extraordinary Pukumani poles commissioned in 1958 from Tiwi artists by AGNSW Deputy Director Tony Tuckson were exceptionally housed in an art gallery rather than an ethnographic collection, only to languish for years in a dimly-lit, ethnographic display in the archival basement.

The art/craft distinction was another tough fixed legacy of European modernism. The role of arts and crafts advisers and the arts-crafts workshop may be traced back through utopian socialists such as William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose arts and crafts ideals travelled across the Empire along the old trade and missionary routes. ‘Fancywork’ (embroidery, appliqué, beading) taught to First Nations women by nuns, missionaries and reservation/mission wives intersected with local cultural knowledges, materials and skills. Cultural survival and celebration, and a savvy understanding of white consumer demand underscores the rich history of this under-documented area of art practice. DWC would iron freshly printed tablecloths and serviettes at night, just as artists at the Babarra and Merrepin textile workshops do today.

This historical meeting of fancywork and abstraction is ironically showcased through the versatility of the silkscreen production process. Silkscreen’s techniques, experimental qualities and suitability for small editions were already well known to Australian modernist artists and designers like Margaret Preston and Marion Hall Best. The introduction to Australia of brilliant Marimekko prints from Finland, with their bright circles and stripes, were a platform for the introduction of all-over textile design on the Tiwi Islands, as documented by DWC. Bede Tungutalum was excited by the possibilities as seen here in his earliest textile prints, featuring circles and leaves birds and animals from 1974.

 

How It All Began offers textile truth-telling in the lead-up to the Voice to Parliament referendum. The artists use cloth and paper to tell tales of encounter, of Country, of creative cultural survival and economic adventure, of uneven government initiatives and of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists seeking new spaces in the art-world. This exhibition makes manifest historical interactions across cultures, feeding pathways to voice, treaty and truth.

 

“My Land is coming back to me in a Dream. The songs are all in my head, the images are all in my head.” — Bede Tungutalum.

How It All Began: Tiwi Textiles and Prints draws on Diana Wood Conroy’s archives including Tiwi textiles from 1974, diaries, tapestries and watercolour painting, and from the joint book Tiwi Textiles, co-authored with Bede Tungutalum (launched December 2022).

Footnotes:
1. Aboriginal people, through the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council, began to have some power over government structures and funding. Support came through the marketing initiatives of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA), with the goal being to establish community cultural and economic sustainability, training and employment.

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

Bede Tungutalum, Murntangkala, Linocut, 55 x 102 cm. Printed 2015 by Duck Print Fine Art Limited Edition, Port Kembla.

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

Riste Andrevski. Bede Tungutalum. Photographic Portrait  at Port Kembla. 3 December 2022

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

Riste Andrevski. Diana Wood Conroy. Photographic Portrait at Port Kembla. 3 December 2022

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

How It All Began, Installation view, The Cross Art Projects, 2023

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

Bede Tungutalum, Universe, Wampaka 1, 2015, printed 2015 from original linocut from 1990s, linocut on rag paper, 56 x 76.5 cm. Duck Print Fine Art Limited Edition, Port Kembla. 7 prints available (Detail). Photo: Silversalt.

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

Bede Tungutalum, Universe, Wampaka 2, 2015, lithograph on chine colléin Japanese rice paper, 56 cm x 76.5 cm. Duck Print Fine Art Limited Edition, Port Kembla. 1 artist proof available, signed. (Detail). Photo: Silversalt.

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

Bede Tungutalum, Pukumani Poles, printed 2015 from original linocut from 1990s, linocut on rag paper, 53.5 x 76 cm. Duck Print Fine Art Limited Edition, Port Kembla. Edition of 10. 10 available. (Detail). Photo: Silversalt

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

(Clockwise from top left): Bede Tungutalum, Turtle majirti, 1969, linocut printed on Japanese paper, 38.5 x 30.5 cm. Bede Tungutalum, Possum wuninga, 1971, linocut printed on Japanese paper, 30.5 x 38.5 cm. Bede Tungutalum, Goose, awurnanka, 1969, linocut printed on Japanese paper, 38.5 x 30.5 cm. Bede Tungutalum, Butterfly kwarikwaringa, 1969, linocut printed on Japanese paper, 30.5 x 38.5 cm. Elizabeth and Ross Kalucy Collection. Photo: Silversalt

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

How It All Began, Installation view, The Cross Art Projects, 2023

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

Bede Tungutalum with Diana Wood Conroy, Blue Circles, 1974, screen print with cut paper and older motifs of twin birds and shore bird, 1.6 x 1.34 m. (Detail). Photo: Silversalt.

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

How It All Began, Installation view, The Cross Art Projects, 2023

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

(L): Bede Tungutalum, Geometric and River with leaves in brown (2 screens), 1974, hand hemmed tablecloth on yellow polyester, 106 x 126 cm. Collection: Diana Wood Conroy. (R): Bede Tungutalum, Leaves with circular motifs, 1974, two colour screenprinted tablecloth on green polyester cotton. In use by Marion Carment Wood for 30 years. (Detail). Photo: Silversalt

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

How It All Began, Installation view, The Cross Art Projects, 2023

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

(L): How It All Began: Tiwi Textiles and Prints, slide presentation courtesy of Diana Wood Conroy. (R): Diana Wood Conroy, Tiwi Tree, 1974, woven tapestry: jute and wool on linen warp with twill elements and soumak lines, 1.15 x 1.15 m. Photo: Silversalt.

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

Diana Wood Conroy, Tiwi Tree, 1974, woven tapestry: jute and wool on linen warp with twill elements and soumak lines, 1.15 x 1.15 m. (Detail). Photo: Silversalt

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

Diana Wood Conroy, Tiwi Tree, 1974, woven tapestry: jute and wool on linen warp with twill elements and soumak lines, 1.15 x 1.15 m. (Detail). Photo: Silversalt

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

How It All Began, Installation view, The Cross Art Projects, 2023

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

Diana Wood Conroy, Chronologies Tiwi islands 1974 – Woonona 2012, 2012, watercolour and pencil on Arches paper (16 pieces), each 21 x 15 cm. Overall framed dimensions 1.15 x 90 cm. Notes: The painted 
texts and their dates mirror the dates of the DWC journal written on Bathurst Island NT, 1974. (Detail). Photo: Silversalt

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

Diana Wood Conroy, Self-portrait in a museum, 2021, watercolour on paper (12 pieces), each 15 x 21 cm, overall framed 80 x 80 cm. Notes: The paintings represent artefacts in the Nicholson Museum Collection, University of Sydney, Chau Chak Wing Museum. (Detail). Photo: Silversalt

How It All Began: Tiwi Textiles and Prints, slide presentation courtesy of Diana Wood Conroy

Artist Biographies
 
Diana Wood Conroy is an artist and scholar. Her wide research interests combine contemporary visual cultures with the archaeology of fresco and textiles in Cyprus, most recently in The Handbook of Textile Culture (with Janis Jefferies and Hazel Clark, in 2018) and in Weaving Culture in Europe (published in Athens, Greece, 2017). Her tapestry and drawings are held in national and international collections. She is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
Bede Tungutalum Ampuruwaiuah (Tuuntulumi, Tiwi people) was born in 1952 at Wurrumiyanga (Nguiu), Bathurst Island, northern Australia. His father, well-known sculptor Gabriel Tungutalum, taught him to carve and paint traditional designs, as well as ceremonial stories, songs and dances. Bede Tungutalum works in a wide range of mediums, including carved and painted wooden sculpture, lino and textile prints, woodblocks, etchings and lithographs. His work is held in most national galleries in Australia. In 2020 Bede received the Special Recognition prize at the inaugural National Indigenous Fashion Awards, recognising 50 years in textiles.
 
The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023

TIWI TEXTILES Design, Making, Process by Diana Wood Conroy, Bede Tungutalum
Sydney University Press
01 December 2022

Tiwi Textiles: Design, Making, Process tells the story of the innovative Tiwi Design centre on Bathurst Island in northern Australia, dedicated to the production of hand-printed fabrics featuring Indigenous designs, from the 1970s to today. Written by early art coordinator Diana Wood Conroy with oral testimony from senior Tiwi artist Bede Tungutalum, who established Tiwi Design in 1969 with fellow designer Giovanni Tipungwuti, the book traces the beginnings of the centre, and its subsequent place in the Tiwi community and Australian Indigenous culture more broadly.

Bringing together many voices and images, especially those of little-known older artists of Paru and Wurrumiyanga (formerly Nguiu) on the Tiwi Islands and from the Indigenous literature, Tiwi Textiles features profiles of Tiwi artists, accounts of the development of new design processes, insights into Tiwi culture and language, and personal reflections on the significance of Tiwi Design, which is still proudly operating today.

‘Tiwi Textiles is a unique historical document, a formidable vindication of the accomplishments of great Indigenous artists, and an account of a missing chapter in world art history. The book is a wonderful chronicle of a vital and fertile period for Tiwi practice in the emergence of contemporary Indigenous art. But it is also a charter for the future.’ – Nicholas Thomas FBA FAHA Director, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Purchase here: https://www.abbeys.com.au/book/tiwi-textiles-design-making-process-9781743328637.do

 
Special Thanks
 

To the artists and Djon Mundine; Collections of Diana Wood Conroy; University of Wollongong Collections; Thomas Goulder at Duck Print Fine Art Limited Editions Port Kembla; Anne Galton Conservation; Christina Holder; Northern Territory Library and Archives (Wendy Garden and Clare Armitage). Jo Lyons, Sydney University Press. The Cross Art Projects: Belle Blau, Simon Blau, Catriona Moore, Ace Bourke & Phillip Boulten. Thank you to Diana Wood Conroy for generously selecting photographs for her archive of this exceptional time, artists and people, to accompany the exhibition. 

Note: This exhibition will travel to Northern Territory Library in Darwin with a special opening choreographed by Bede Tungutalum in August 2023.

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. HOW IT ALL BEGAN: Tiwi Textiles and Prints — 18 March to 14 April 2023