Story book

In this film artists and leaders describe the importance of diversity and identity, keeping culture and cultural revival. These things are important because they underpin human health and wellbeing.

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott was a central figure in the history of contemporary ceramics in the 20th century and she retained a remarkable presence in the 21st century ceramic movement.

The building was moved to Kanazawa in 1979 when it was renamed Shoutou-an.

Today is a very special day as we are visiting the Koubei-gama Studio in Tajimi, founded by Koubei Kato in 1804.

We were last in Kanazawa in the heat of the summer when we drove here via the mountains to the north of Gifu.

This story is part of a series which provides students and collectors with an image of a work by Andrea Hylands in the collection of museums or private collectors around the world.

In Japan, sometimes it is a good idea to go and check out what your neighbours are up to. Mitsuko Ando is the third generation to make Bonbori lights or lanterns for the formal display of Hina dolls.

First of all this is a story about Hon-minoshi, the beautiful hand-made paper from Gifu Prefecture. A parcel arrives from Gifu and we discover that snowflakes fall as beetles do.

There is the natural world in Gifu, butterflies flutter by on the soft warm air, the mountains soar to the sky and forests, dressed in shades of green, march on every hillside.

We visit Japanese papermaker, Takeshi Kano, in his studio in Mino City. In this story Takeshi san demonstrates how the kozo fibres are beaten and then how the fibres are sieved to make the individual sheets of paper.

Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum is a fine example of Japanese museum design. This place of culture was designed by architects Kengo Kuma and Nihon Sekkei.

Ainu craft traditions continue and of the great skills handed down to the current generation of women is the art of Nibutani-attus weaving and embroidery.

Heading out of Darwin we drive south on the Stuart Highway to the small township of Adelaide River. It is here the highway crosses the river.

One hundred and fifty five years ago, a Boorong family at Lake Tyrrell told William Stanbridge something of their stories relating to the night sky.

Andrea and I met John and Kirsty Morieson in 2014 through an introduction by Niagara Galleries director Bill Nuttall.

I started out in 1993, found most of the creatures and the people within two years but took until last year to find Kulkunbulla. One of the Brothers Berm still eludes me.

We take you to Lake Tyrrell in northern Victoria, the country of the Boorong people under the night sky.

Reflections of a Japanese life in a time before COVID.

To the south west of Alice Springs we stand in a place where a remarkable individual lived and worked. And we enter through Albert Namatjira’s front door. We have not been to this place before.

Not that far from Wallace Rockhole in Tjoritja (the West MacDonnell Ranges country) is the community of Hermannsburg (the sacred site of Ntaria). The township is 130km to the west of Alice Springs.

Bark paintings are remarkable works of art, they are also a page from the book of Aboriginal knowledge. Here we look at the back of a bark painting in the Creative cowboy films collection.

Sid and I go to sit by the beach of a million bleached shells, piled high along the tide's edge for as far as the eye can see. This too is Saltwater Crocodile territory. The Crocodiles sleep in the morning sun. It is here we stop to talk.

At the end of April 2014 Bwgcolman elder and artist Billy Doolan travelled to Hong Kong to begin a residency at the Hong Kong Institute of Education and so begins a journey of friendship and of sharing culture with Chinese friends.

Then the white man came along and he shot, bang, bang, bang. And he put in these bullet holes in these objects and what happened next is he tried to pull the culture to pieces. What I am doing now is to put the pieces back together again.

As the day fades across the waters of the Liverpool River, the reddening sky with its polished marbled patterns reflect golden in the gently undulating waves. On Mangrove shore where giant crocodiles sleep something remarkable is happening.

In the bustling atmosphere of the art fair in Singapore the discussion turns to the stolen generations of Aboriginal children in Australia. Sandra was stolen when she was only seven years old.

In Alice Springs we ask Grandmother Against (child) Removal, Christine Palmer, to tell us about her latest thoughts on the matter of the removal of Indigenous Australian children from their families.

Margie West AM writes about Bardayal Nadjamerrek AO. Kunwinjku language (Kundedjnjenghmi dialect). Wamud Namok was one of most respected and well-known artists working in the Western Arnhem Land painting tradition.

Margie West AM writes about Mick Kubarkku. Mick Kubarkku was an artist from the rugged escarpment region of western Arnhem Land renowned for its extensive galleries of rock art.

Borobudur lay hidden under volcanic ash and forest until Stamford Raffles, who was enthralled by Javanese history and collecting Java’s antiques, organised a dig to expose the long lost temple. The year was 1814. We are with Arahmaiani in Java.

A year or more has passed and we meet Arahmaiani again under a Javan sky to create the installation and performance once more, this time in a field on the banks of the Elo-Progo River in Central Java. Borobudur is close by this location.

This is the seventh in the series of our international magazine creative-i. In this issue we travel to Bangladesh, to India and Tibet.

The Art and nature issue of creative-i takes us on a journey to Australia where we meet a very talented group of individuals, each making a significant contribution to art or science in Australia.

Not only did these visitors not leave, but they broke the law. They killed animals and did not eat their flesh, they killed fish during their breeding season, their animals trampled across our yam gardens and they blocked the rivers and the creeks.

The rise and rise of contemporary art in Indonesia is reflected by the Indonesian Pavilion at Art Stage Singapore where the work is compelling and a demonstration of how contemporary art can be a powerful reflection of society and meaning.

We visit the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair and head further north to see Sid Bruce Short Joe in Pormpuraaw, Cape York.

At home once more and in London we visit Christopher Green in the scholar’s room of the British Library. Christopher is the British Library's first artist in residence.

In the article Silent country Alick Tipoti makes us think about the importance of language in preserving culture, in The world we make we look at the impact of our own actions on Indigenous cultures and we visit our Maasai friends in the Rift Valley.

During this period of drought the journeys for the Maasai men grew ever longer, as they searched for pastures to feed their animals.

Sitting in the upstairs bar at Paddington Station, the train to Oxford delayed, time for another pint to wash down the London air. Soon we were on the train, then out, beyond the London suburbs, looking at the rolling green countryside flashing by.

Traditional art school or studio practice is that you have a studio nude and you paint the figure quite anonymously and in a way that it does not really matter who the person is. They are just a body or a type that you are painting.

Australian sculptor William Eicholtz completes a major commission for the City of Yarra in Melbourne. The bronze casting techniques used here are similar to those of ancient Greece.

One of the most creative and technically brilliant sculptors in Australia, William Eicholtz, works from his studio nearby to Creative cowboy films’ base in Melbourne, we visit William’s studio to view a new body of work.

I want to take you to Xi’an, the home of the Chinese warriors. The discovery of the Chinese warriors by Mr Yang in 1974, while drilling for water and what Yang’s initial discovery will lead to, as excavations continue, are extraordinary.

Angela’s art practise focuses on urban culture as ‘a tangible expression of the disappearing city value and local cityscape’. Angela explores the correlation between urban development and city value via installation and photography.

By any measure the ceramic sculptures created by Hsu Yung-Hsu are impressive. The works are very large in scale, hand built ceramic forms that are technically challenging to create.

The Animal Farm series is composed of 36 complex tableaus and intimate portraits. The large works are just under two meters wide, the portraits just over a metre wide.

Art history, the fourth edition of the Singapore Biennale. 82 artists and artist collectives, 13 countries and 27 curators, multiple venues. Many of the works of art were commissioned for SB2013. Art from the region predominated.

Singapore’s built heritage and contemporary enterprise and achievement have come together to create a series of beautifully designed institutions, where history, culture and contemporary art are now exhibited.

We contemplate the ways in which architecture should contribute to the development of modern communities across the tropical world and particularly in South East Asia.

It is early on Sunday morning in New Delhi, the plan is to drive south to visit Agra and the Taj Mahal. The drive should take about four hours, so there is time to do the round trip in a day.

It is mid January and we are in Tamil Nadu. The southern Indian light still bright, and its sun, still warm as we visit a favourite place for another story about the architecture and buildings of India.

For more than one thousand years our temple by the sea, the Shore Temple, as it is known, has stood here resisting the lapping waves and the salty winds that have licked at and melted its precious masonry.

This time we visit the Mehrauli region, one of seven ancient cities that compose the State of Delhi, here we visit the Qutb complex. It is December and the days are still warm as the winter shadows lengthen.

Chennai’s Marina Beach extends about 12 kilometers from Beasant Nagar in the south to Fort St. George in the north, it is here we find a sculpture garden and a place where children come to play on the marvellous machines of Marina Beach.

Sore hands and heavy work raising the catch skyward and increasingly so, and over the long years, the catch becomes lighter and there are fewer fish for our fishermen to sell.

We are here to look at something that also has deep roots in Kerala’s culture, a story dance performance, the highly stylised dance drama called Kathakali.

The roads we are travelling on have also become trade routes of India. The roadsides are places of work. What happens by the roadside tells you a lot about a place here.

Our thanks to George Bernard Shaw. Following their meeting in 1931, Gandhi said of Bernard Shaw “I think he is a very good man”. Bernard Shaw’s response on the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi is the quote used in this story.

So let’s step back and take a journey in pictures and stories through Southern India with the Creative cowboy films crew and think of our friends across this beautiful and incredibly complex country.

Irankarapte is Ainu and it means hello, well much more than hello – allow me to touch your heart gently.

Peter Hylands asked Dr Stéphane Laurent (Professor and Director of Research at the Sorbonne University) to write this article in English to give us all a perspective on France's intellectual connection to the Indigenous people of Australia.

We join Raymond Bulambula to collect ochres which he will then use to create a new painting. Raymond, Zanette, Andrea and I head out of Milingimbi township in the morning light, along a small bush track and to a nearby coastal mangrove area.

We have always understood that it is a crime to remove Indigenous peoples from their land and that any such removal represents the worst kind of colonialism and exploitation.

The Women’s Centre in Maningrida is busy this morning. In a cluster of buildings that include the Djomi Museum and the former art centre building, the Women’s Centre is yet another hub of creativity in this historic place of art making.

The Burrup Peninsula, or in local language the Murujuga, in the remote North West of Western Australia, contains an extraordinary collection of ancient rock carvings created by many hundreds of generations of Aboriginal people across the millennia.

Images which appear to depict mega fauna and other extinct species, such as the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), fat-tailed macropod and Tasmanian Devil, are evident in the petroglyphs.

In 2007 I was asked to read a statement by the RT. Hon. Malcolm Fraser AC, CH, Prime Minister of Australia (1975-1983) at Melbourne’s Federation Square. The statement was in support of the preservation of the ancient rock art of the Murujuga.

This extraordinarily significant site, the Murujuga, gives us vital insights into the pre-history of man, continues to be under significant pressure from even more commercial development in the form of industrial infrastructure.

We leave the River Cam and go now to a very different body of water, the blue and turquoise sea with its coral cays and volcanic islands of the Torres Strait so many thousands of miles away.

Brian Robinson tells Peter Hylands about his men + GODS exhibition (KickArts, Cairns, North Queensland, 2012). Brian’s exhibition takes us on a visual journey through a world of mythology, a journey of tension between men and Gods.

In this film the founder of the Wallace Rockhole Community and Ilpurla Outstation in Central Australia, talks about what happened to the old people of the Finke River country.

We take you back more than 400 years to 1606 and the Dutch East India Company vessel Duyfken as it dropped anchor at Cape Keerweer in the Gulf of Carpentaria all those centuries ago.

The flight from Darwin is descending, we bank and fly low over the MacDonnell Ranges. Alice Springs Airport is just ahead. Bags unloaded we jump into the car and head mostly west to Wallace Rockhole.

East Arnhem Land and we join Laklak Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru at Buku-Lanrrnggay Mulka Art Centre. This is Yolŋu country.

Bully Saylor and Peter Hylands are on Erub in the Torres Strait close to the corner of Australia’s north eastern boundary and close by the Great Barrier Reef and New Guinea.

It seems that all roads lead to Mino where the Nagara River flows. Mino steeped in ceramics, paper and light and some very beautiful Edo period houses.

Back in Mino and we work with traditional Japanese papermaker, Takeshi Kano. The creative cowboy films team clap when Takeshi-san finishes his morning’s work. You get the feeling he deserves the spontaneous applause.

In our lives there are days to remember. Our days in Yamagata will live long in our memories. We start our journey in a spiritual Shinto heartland as we visit Mount Haguro, the most accessible and one of three mountains.

This morning we are in Yamagata City and we have been invited to a tea ceremony at Seifuso, the Chashitsu (teahouse) yet another beautiful and purposeful building in its white snow landscape in a Maple park.

The snow is falling heavily as we arrive at Ginzan Onsen, there are metres of it everywhere. For me these are memories of an Alpine childhood all those years ago in Carinthia.

We gather at Governor Mieko Yoshimura’s welcoming reception for the UNWTO at the Bunshokan Former Assembly Building in Yamagata City, now beautifully restored. It is early February and the snow is all around us.

Autumn days in Kyushu in the far west of Japan and we catch the train south to the City of Kagoshima. This is to be a journey of reflection.

The morning of the 6th of August 1945. It is 8.15 am and the world’s first atomic bomb to be used in war, explodes 600 metres above Hiroshima.

Christopher Green received Creative cowboy films’ European web award in Piccadilly. The award was for our analysis of Brexit and its impact on the social and economic prospects of the UK. We were simply stating the obvious. It is not over yet.

Tokyo National Museum is a storehouse of treasures. The museum’s collection is made up of 114,000 items and includes 87 National Treasures and 634 Important Cultural Properties. Around 3,000 objects are exhibited at any one time.

First stop is Kyoto’s Nishiki Market 錦市場, a thriving shopping precinct, an undercover and narrow alley, which stretches for five blocks in the downtown district. Most of what is here is food related.

The National Museum of Art in Osaka was opened in late 1997 as the fourth national museum in Japan. The building was originally designed as the Exposition Museum of Fine Arts at Osaka’s Expo 70 and was then redeveloped to its current use.

A journey through modernity and tradition from Tokyo to Kyoto on a Shinkansen to the heart of ancient Japanese culture and tradition.

In this film we join Arahmaiani as she paints Grey by the Elo-Progo River in Central Java and in Singapore, Tony Godfrey, Equator Art Projects, talks to Arahmaiani about the grey paintings.

As the rain hammers down on the streets and buildings of tropical Cairns it was once again time to visit master printer Theo Tremblay in his print workshop Editions Tremblay NFP (no fixed press) at Canopy Artspace.

Soe Naing (Myanmar) at Art Stage Singapore in January 2014. Powerful work and performance with greater resonance than ever, loaded with history, humanity, compassion and suffering. The Singapore audience thought so as well.

Joe Dhamanydji is a guardian of cultural knowledge, not all of this knowledge can be shared with non-Aboriginal people. He is the proud Chairman of Milingimbi Art and Culture.

Water lilies are many things, they are beautiful, they are numerous, around 70 species, water lilies live in the tropics and in temperate zones. Aquatic herbs, water lilies have been an important food source for Indigenous people since ancient time.

Jacob, from the Datawuy clan, has been playing Yidaki since he was three. In Milingimbi young people learn to play the Yidaki using leftover plastic plumber's pipe. When you are big enough to hold the Yidaki it is time to play the real thing.

Before taking us to her island homeland of Langarra, Ruth Ngalmakarra tells us about Milingimbi Art and Culture and the artistic traditions of the region.

We look back to 2014 and the stunningly beautiful community of Yirrkala. It is also a place where a lot of very clever stuff happens and the world knows it.

We join Napuwarri Marawili as we select a hollow log for the artist to create a larrakitj or memorial pole. The hollow log, bark removed, will be sanded and prepared and then painted using the traditional and sacred designs of Napuwarri’s clan.

Among the very precious things in Australia is the cultural knowledge of its Indigenous people. Today and at the Mulka Project’s home in Yirrkala, this knowledge and the latest technology meet, two knowledge economies entwined.

When it comes to standing strong and connecting globally, the Yolŋu set the gold standard for us all. It is in this way and in April 2018 that Prince Charles visited Yirrkala in East Arnhem Land.