Click to enlarge- Region
- South-East Australia
- Community
- Gippsland
Tupias Sketches - Kamay, 2020
oil on canvas
60 x 159 cm
$7,000
- Provenance
- Direct from the artist, ACT Cooee Aboriginal Art Gallery, NSW
- Exhibited
- Transculturation: Sublime and Surreal Encounters of First Contact in the Antipodes, Helen S Tiernan, Cooee Aboriginal Art Gallery, NSW, May – June 2017
- Artwork story
- Another articulation of Tiernan’s cross-cultural narratives is the interweaving of symbolic references to instruments and vehicles of navigation, the subject of paintings from her earlier exhibitions that highlighted the technologies of innovation which has existed for both cultures. She inhabits her paintings variously to elaborate on this context, using sailing ships, canoes with mobile kitchens, paddle steamers, boats, and most recently a space shuttle, stone walled fish traps, and spears as tools of technology that supported efficient food harvest. The technology of navigation is referenced by quoting variously to cardinal points on the map, nautical navigational charts, star configurations, rock art, Songlines and scar tree carvings. Aboriginal peoples fishing in the sea and along inland waterways is testament of their traditional lives that continued almost undisturbed in remote areas during the colonial years. Her use of gold in this context references at once the preciousness of the landscape to Indigenous Australians, and from a European view, its value as a commodity of capitalist trade and development. …Two Worlds (100x100cm) This symbolic early intercultural encounter suggests the naïve, open hearted intimacy offered by Indigenous peoples to visitors to their lands. This is supported by the attitude of the family portrayed and the warm golden palette and all-over imprint of Indigenous body painting and engravings. Charging the encounter with the spirit of Indigenous cultural inflection, is the presence of three ghostly outlines of large shields, hovering in the sky over the ship like sentinels or Ancestral Spirits, posing questions perhaps about the outcome of this encounter. The Large crescent engraving is referencing Indigenous astronomy and the use of Cardinal points to gauge the seasons in such ancient sites as the Bora-Rings and Stone Arrangements at the Carisbrook site in Victoria, either end of the instrument refers to east and north, with the inscriptions ‘E” and “N” directing toward the respective sites.