Nyapanyapa: The constant artist
Moving image: Explore cultures and art making around the world
“For Nyapanyapa making art was a constant process and the central theme of her traditional life in the Yolngu community of Yirrkala”.
Duration
30.12
Director
Andrea and Peter Hylands
Cinematography
Andrea Hylands
Creative cowboy films would like to thank Will Stubbs, Kade McDonald, Joseph Brady, Ishmael Marika, Watjumi Mununggurr, Adrian Kellett, Samuel Murnane, Fiora Neate, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Mulka Project and VCA Print Workshop.
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Nyapanyapa’s paintings are held in major public collections in Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin.
Nyapanyapa is represented by Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, Arnhem Land and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia.
Each and every day Nyapanyapa worked at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, the internationally famous art centre at Yirrkala in East Arnhem Land. The country, the land and sea, deep in long held knowledge, in culture, in law, in nature and in creativity.
Warning to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers that the content of this film contains images and voices of Indigenous people now deceased.
In this film we meet Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. We begin our art journey at the VCA Print Workshop at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and then we rejoin Nyapanyapa a few weeks later as she works at her art centre in East Arnhem Land.
Nyapanyapa's paintings are bold and vigorous and contemporary. The method of painting on bark is traditional. Her barks, painted with a brush of human hair using traditional ochres.
There are works on paper using contemporary materials, pens and archival paper and modern paints. There are the ever-changing light paintings. There are composite works of grand scale. There is print making too. Nyapanyapa’s paintings, her barks, works on paper and in electronic media (animation light paintings) are individual works, different and not sacred.
In the United States Nyapanyapa is recognised as one of Australia’s most exciting artists receiving commissions for large works from major American institutions.
In 2012 Nyapanyapa’s work was exhibited at the 18th Biennale of Sydney. In 2014, Nyapanyapa was included in Ian Potter Museum of Art’s The World is Not a Foreign Land, the exhibition will tour around Australia until 2016. A number of her works were selected for inclusion in Yirrkala Drawings (2014) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
In 2014 the National Gallery of Victoria exhibited several works, including Nyapanyapa’s major ‘light painting’ animation. In 2011 a similar work was also exhibited at the Art Gallery of Western Australia as part of the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards.
"In Arnhem Land another tropical day turns itself to sunset. The dry season fires of East Arnhem Land push their smoke across the setting sun. The red sky burns. In this place the Yolngu people, recognise that the land and the sea are connected in a single cycle of life. In this way so too are the philosophies and rigid rules of kinship connected. As the sun melts below the horizon, shellfish and crabs are gathered from the sea and shore. The campfires are burning".
Nyapanyapa’s art tells stories about her daily life, perhaps a visit to Sydney for an exhibition opening and often stories about her life in East Arnhem Land, where the search for food can become an exciting and dangerous adventure. There are the powerful and respected saltwater crocodiles, the ancient Baru, and there are introduced Asian Buffalo, as Nyapanyapa was to find out, dangerous and deadly if encountered on a journey.
The mines have also come to East Arnhem Land and to Yolngu country. The 1960s giant Alumina Refinery, a dreaming from another shore, has done its work and sits on Yolngu land near Nhulunbuy and in caretaker mode, its workers gone to whence they came. The bauxite mine continues, the red ore shipped elsewhere for processing.
In this film Nyapanyapa takes us on the long journey south to Melbourne and to the print workshop at the Victorian College of the Arts as she works with print maker Adrian Kellett.
Nyapanyapa is a remarkable artist. While humble in her work and international acclaim she is part of a talented and distinguished family, she is the sister of two Australian’s of the year.
Each year just one Australian citizen, since the award was introduced in1960, is selected to be the Australian of the Year, so to have two members of her family, her brothers, receive the award is remarkable.
As Nyapanyapa works on her print she thinks about her journeys with her sisters, journeys where the women gathered food that included shellfish and yams as they enjoyed their adventures together.
"Yolngu people know their lands and seas in great detail and the places where the food and water can be collected. They know which places are sacred. This knowledge and connection to place, created by thousands of years of habitation in this place.
European settlers have only occupied Australia for around one third of one per cent of the total timeline of the human habitation of Australia and even today, 235 years after European settlement, very few non-indigenous people would know how to survive in this bountiful land and where to find the yams and other food plants and where to find fresh water".
In 2008 Nyapanyapa won the very prestigious 25th National Aboriginal Art Award, she had also been selected for the prize in 2007 and 2009.
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