sights and sites

Nici Cumpston, Ringbarked 2008, archival print on canvas, hand-coloured with pencil and watercolour.

Source: Unisa

Uni's started again this week! No more time for lazing around but time to work, work, work! Especially since there's only 4 more weeks left! I really can't imagine how fast this semester has gone by. Nonetheless, as always this week was another interesting week in learning a bit more about Aboriginal art. In today's lecture, we had a guest speaker: Nici Cumpston, a Barakunji woman whose family originated in the broken Hill region who is both an artist and curator...and actually also the person who wrote this course! She gave us a very nice presentation about both of her role in curating an exhibition called "Desert Country" as well as about her own artworks. It was definitely a change of scene from the usual lecture slides and also interesting in being able to hear an Aboriginal artist speak personally about what their work is about.





I think one of the main highlights of her presentation apart from the array of works she collected from the Desert regions, were definitely her own photography of one of the largest fresh water lakes in Australia. I think they were amazing - her photographs seems to have this unique quality to them, especially through the technique she uses of hand colouring the black and white photographs using water colour, pencils or acrylic. They emmenate a sense of serenity; it looked realistic and surrealistic at the same time, almost dream-like. However, what is most significant of her photographs is the story behind them - a story about looking at sites from an Aboriginal perspective and about showing the presence of Aboriginal people from long ago.

Nici Cumpston, Keeper 2008, inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper

Source: FLASH

We see a landscape in her photographs, a tree. But is it merely a tree? It holds a story about the past, it is a shelter tree where people enter for safety or a birthing place. In another photograph, we see a site with a few trees around but is it really just a picture of a "place"? As she confronts issues of sustainability and the impact on a culture that occupied the place for thousands of years, (1) what I think is most intriguing is the hidden signs in her photographs. As a non-Aboriginal person when I look at her images, the first thing I notice is a landscape void of any living beings, they almost seem empty in a way but in fact they are rich of signs. The type of tree actually signifies that it is a safe place and the burnt charcoal on the tree trunks signify their presence - it's just that I don't see it...but as Nici shares the story of these places I begin to get a glimpse of how Aboriginal people view the sites: it's sacredness and its significance which I believe her technique clearly compliments this link between land and its metaphorical meanings. 

After looking at her photographs, you can really see that these "hidden meanings" comes back to the difference in perspective of how Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people see the land. In the lecture, Nici mentioned the use of the word "remote" used by many to describe places outside the city which we think are void and scarce when to Aboriginal people it is actually a place full of sites - it is the center of the earth for them. Just like during the colonization period, the settlers simply conquered the land by their own will, which in part is I think because of their perception that the land was not being used:

The conquest of the 'new world' was accomplished by people who were convinced that they had both the ability and the right to go anywhere and to claim anything. In their arrogance and violence they walked into and on top of the sacred palces of the world they claimed, without even knowing where they were. (1)

What we may see as normal landscape photography, they are not. Nici's photographs are of sites that have significance for the Aboriginal people:

A site is place. The power that created the world is located here, and when a persona walks to this place, they put their body in the locus of creation. The beings who amde and make the world have left something here- their body, thier power, their conciousness, their Law. To stand here is to be known by that power. (2)

This is the fundamental issue beneath the disputes about land between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. In the video "Old Country, New Country,"an Aboriginal man shows his deep concern and frustration on how non-Aboriginal people have built factories in his homeland. It is their responsibility to take care of the land (3) but they can't, they do not have the power to do so. The land is more to Aboriginal people than what many of us may see it as - The Mountain Gulaga to the Umbarra people is a "Dreaming woman; the mountain is her body"(4) and it is sacred and important to them:

They should not log the mountain. If they keep on logging there'll be nothing there. We'll have nothing to show our kids. It will be just a legend. (5)

I think this truly highlights the importance in acknowledging that while places mean different things to people, we need to respect each other. Even though it may seem like a small thing how Nici used the original Aboriginal names of the places she collected artworks for her exhibiton before the English names, it shows a sense of recognition that this land belongs to the Aboriginal people, in the same way the reconciliation sculptures around the city have been created and Aboriginal names have been used to name parklands and several buildings. 

"You've got to understand- I'd give my life for this mountain"(6)

References:
(1) Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, ed., The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture  (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40. 
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid., 45. 
(4) Ibid. 
(5) Ibid., 46.
(6) Ibid.