The Dust Never Settles

Seventy-three pieces from the University of Queensland Art Collection, some on public display for the first time, are on view now in Brisbane. Together they communicate that while our powers of perception give new life to memories, this fresh understanding doesn’t always offer closure. ‘The Dust Never Settles’ has been curated by Michele Helmrich and finds strength in addressing what remains unfinished.

Rosemary Laing, welcome to Australia, 2004, from the series ‘to walk on a sea of salt’, type-c photograph, edition 5/7, image 110 x 224cm, frame 127 x 243 x 6cm. Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2007. Courtesy the artist and The University of Queensland, Brisbane

Artists who restage our history and contemporary experience present work which, as Helmrich explained, “may be forthright or nuanced, perhaps even ambiguous in its message. And we, as viewers, come to these works with our own set of ethical and personal values, which may or may not align with those held by others in our community.” In conversation with the curator we asked about how a collective and also deeply personal connection to culture, psychology and our relationship to the environment is addressed by the artists.

Environmental issues are a key part of the exhibition. Pitjantjatjara artist Mumu Mike Williams, from Mimili in the APY Lands of South Australia, takes an unflinching look at the poisoning of traditional lands, illness and deaths, caused by the British nuclear tests at Maralinga and Emu Field between 1953 and 1963. His protest is handwritten in language on large drawings of Australia. Mining and its past, present and future environmental impact features in works by Taloi Havini and Stuart Miller, Kathy Inkamala and Gloria Pannka, Nicholas Mangan, and Luke Roberts, their works pertaining to Bougainville, Central Australia, and the proposed Adani Carmichael coal mine in Central Queensland.

An interesting aside in the show is the role art and museums can play when cultural knowledge and practices are under threat. As Helmrich proposed, “Our histories of collecting material culture and information on cultural knowledge and practices are not without significant problems, but at the same time museums are extraordinary repositories.” She noted that some Indigenous artists have turned to museums to re-learn aspects of cultural knowledge or practices. For example, Abe Muriata, a Girramay elder from Far North Queensland, taught himself how to make jawun, bicornial (two cornered) baskets, learning in part from jawun held in museum collections. Angelica Mesiti, on the other hand, uses a cinematic medium to record performed practices. Her three-channel video The Calling (2013-2014) brings a focus to the whistling languages still in use in remote European landscapes, despite the inroads of modern communications. For over a year, Mesiti conducted research, shot film and recorded sound in the village of Kuşköy on the Black Sea coast of northern Turkey, the island of La Gomera in Spain’s Canary Islands, and the village of Antia on the Greek island of Evia.

Judy Watson, the holes in the land 2, 2015, etching on paper, edition 7/30, image 49.5 x 37.5cm, sheet 70 x 54cm. Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased with the assistance of Cathryn Mittelheuser AM in memory of Margaret Mittelheuser AM, 2015. Courtesy the artists and The University of Queensland, Brisbane

The experience and consequence of loss and dispossession is a crucial thread in ‘The Dust Never Settles’. Indigenous artists continue to reflect on the history of post-settlement Australia. Dale Harding’s three etchings bright eyed little dormitory girls – sack 1-3 (2013) draw on memories within the artist’s family of experiences under government control at the Woorabinda Aboriginal Mission in Central Queensland. Judy Watson’s suite of etchings the holes in the land (2015) record cultural objects collected in times of colony and frontier violence that are held in the British Museum far from the communities that made them in northern Australia. Rosemary Laing’s photograph welcome to Australia (2004) declares the psychological damage inflicted on asylum seekers within the stark exterior and razor wire of the former Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre north of Adelaide, such treatment then continued off-shore.

Despite the exhibition encircling memory and the past, one of the earliest works on view presents the third space of ‘a future’. Bonita Ely’s A mother shows her daughter to the universe (outer space) (1982; printed 2014) is a photograph of the artist’s performance of 1982 – she stands within a mandala of wheat holding out her baby. “This acknowledgment of new birth is optimistic, but in the knowledge of our present world and the many, especially environmental, issues that have accrued, it is also deeply poignant”, said Helmrich. As such, this artwork underscores the overall suggestion of the exhibition that to acknowledge the past and present enables us to exist authentically and plan for the future, with the curator concluding, “Forgiving may not be uppermost in the minds of the artists in this exhibition – certainly they do not wish us to forget.”

Mumu Mike Williams (Painting), Sammy Dodd (Spear), Tjilpi munu pampangku Tjukurpa kunpu kanyintjaku (It’s the senior men and senior women who keep the law), ink and tea on paper, with two spears; image 100 x 150cm, spears 210cm. Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2016. Courtesy the artists and The University of Queensland, Brisbane

Full artist list: Khadim Ali, Richard Bell & Emory Douglas, Gordon Bennett, Barbara Campbell, Bonita Ely, Susan Fereday, Fiona Hall, Dale Harding, Taloi Havini & Stuart Miller, Kathy Inkamala, Rosemary Laing, Emma Lindsay, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Abe Muriata, Raquel Ormella, Gloria Pannka, Patricia Piccinini, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Luke Roberts, Caroline Rothwell, Martin Smith, Spinifex Women’s Collaborative, James Tylor, Judy Watson, Mumu Mike Williams and Sammy Dodd.

UQ Art Museum
Until 30 July, 2017
Brisbane

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