Hot Chocolate Exhibition

2011 Studio

These were the works I've done in my second year studio.
Few concepts I've come up with about a topic 'Australia', however I did a few concepts of Aboriginals.
First one (clockwise), I've made a clay Aboriginals wearing cowboy hats which was a strong symbol for outback white people.
Second one is the weather and the land representation. Using various fabrics, I made a panel which reminds of hot dessert weather of Australia (also strongly connected with the Aboriginal flag; the colours) as well as the representation of distrinution of land and the sea.
The last one is a mobil which is a combination of Aboriginal dotted art and the Japanese origami crane. (The idea of dotted art on the stick is from Lin Onus' painting) 

Lin Onus

Lin Onus is the contemporary Indigenous Artist whose artwork I admire and love with passion.
I love Onus' detail and delicate painting skills, the size of his art works, and his brilliant way of expressing and conveying ideas.  From a beautiful landscape painting like the ‘Barmah Forest’ to a sculpture like the ‘Fruit bats’, Lin Onus displayed his interest and concern for the recognition of Aboriginal art and culture. 

appropriation

the definition of the term 'appropriation'

noun

• 1. [mass noun] the action of appropriating something: dishonest appropriation of propertythe deliberate reworking of images and styles from earlier, well-known works of art: the hallmark of postmodernism has turned out to be appropriation 
  2. a sum of money allocated officially for a particular use: success in obtaining appropriations for projects [as modifier]: the appropriation accounts
  
  In his paper, Richard Bell has revealed that as the result of a concerted and sustained marketing strategy, Art of Aboriginals have been categorised into an Aboriginal Art Industry. There is, however, no Aboriginal Art Industry but an industry that caters for Aboriginal Art. 
  The key players in that industry are not Aboriginals but White people whose areas of expertise are in the fields of Anthropology and Western Art. 
  The problem arises out of the very nature of Western Art. Westerners need to sort and categorise everything in order to make sense of the World. That they do so in an ethnocentric manner is academic. 
  Another issue Bell has revealed was the Art centre. Aboriginal Art forshadowed the establishment of community art centres throughout remote areas. These centres assist by providing advice, marketing opportunities/strategies, art supplies and documentation. 
The Government's continued financial support of the Art Centre movement ensures some level of Government control over the industry that caters for Aboriginal Art. 

(Bell's thought on this) Their (the Government=White people) considerable contribution makes it look good. They think it justrifies their appropriation of Aboriginal imaginery in advertising campaigns, etc. They think that they have bought our culture. Well, sorry. It never happened. 

Rabbit Proof Fence (2002)

What would be the famous and astonishing film out of all from Australia?
If I was asked, then without any pause, I would say the Rabbit Proof Fence.

Brief story:
Western Australia, 1931. Government policy includes taking half-caste children from their Aboriginal mothers and sending them a thousand miles away to what amounts to indentured servitude, "to save them from themselves." Molly, Daisy, and Grace (two sisters and a cousin who are 14, 10, and 8) arrive at their Gulag and promptly escape, under Molly's lead. For days they walk north, following a fence that keeps rabbits from settlements, eluding a native tracker and the regional constabulary.


This movie reminds me of stories from my home country: South Korea.
When South Korea was under Japan's colonisation, there were also attempts to re generate generations. With all beautiful but fake titles and reasons, many of half caste children were born.

  

The Ballad of Jimmy Governor

"Jimmy wanted to be white! He wanted to be white! He had more opportunities than any other Aboriginal man of his time!" This is what one of an Aboriginal curator said about Jimmy Governor.  Would it be true? Would it be really what Jimmy wanted in his life?

The story of Jimmy Governor is a 'memory walk' across a physical and social terrain, evoking many emotions and feelings. It brings out and play on all our human qualities: sorrow, pain, hate, regret, expression, success, joy and optimitism.

Jimmy Governor was three quarters full blood black and one quarter Irish. His fiery red hair clearly established his Irish heritage, but his black body and flat nose declared his aboriginality. Jimmy was handsome, kind, brave and intelligent young man.
Jimmy knew his worth compared to the white men.  He worked for them, he played cricket with them and was hired by the police force of the day as a tracker.
He achieved well at everything he did, but was treated with contempt by some of the white people because he did it so well and dared to declare he was their equal.

After his father's dearth, Jimmy married a white woman, Ethel Page. For Jimmy it was his right to marry a white woman, and he treated her with affection and acceptance, and love for the baby boy to whom she shortly after gave birth.
After he got married, Jimmy took his wife and new born baby with him to Breelong outside Gilgandra where he started to work for John Mawbey.
This was the beginning of the tragedy.

Ethel, Jimmy's wife, worked for no pay for the Mawbey family and suffered daily the taunts and ridicule of the entire family for marrying a black man. These insults she carried home to Jimmy, who daily suffered the jibes from his own people for his marrying of a white woman.
Ethel, young and inexperienced, grew ever angrier about her conditions compared with the fine home and benefits enjoyed by those who considered themselves her betters.

I won't post the whole story of Jimmy Governor here (I assume it is one of the well known story among Australian), but just briefly, members of Mawbey family continued to taunt Ethel and Jimmy and it triggered Jimmy to expose and ended up murdering them as well as nine other victims.

My question here is that was it just a simple exposion of anguish? that Jimmy couldn't control himself in the end and ended up murdering so many white people among the Mawbey's?

The answer I found and it probably isn't an answer but it was a lot convincing than any others.
The person who wrote drew this conclusion out from Jimmy's background.  
Jimmy was born on a Mission run by the Anglican Church, baptised at an early age, and had white values instilled into him, along with an entirely false assertion that to be accepted by the whites, you only had to behave like them.
Jimmy's open and accepting manner led him to believe this, and to spend his life in an attempt to belong to that elusive group, but even as he struggled to belong, he was breaking their moral code.

What the Aboriginal curator has said in the beginning of the post, I believe for Jimmy, there is no doubt that he wouldnt love his own race and his own brothers and sisters (the Aborignal tribe he belonged to), what he probably wished was rather than becoming one of the white, the acceptance and respect from the people he respected.

Spiritual concept

Spitit conception creates an initial link with the ancestral world which is then stregnthened during a person's life. As people grew older they perform in more and more ceremonies and pass through different stages of initiation. At each stage they will have paintings placed on their bodies, be rubbed by sacred objects, see ceremonial sculptures and have songs sung over them.

All these actions associate them with the ancestral beings and result in the accumulation of spiritual power. By the time they have reached old age they are thought increasingly to resemble the ancestral beings themselves; they have absorbed the substance of the ancestral past and are about to move once again into the dimension of the Dreaming.

On a person's death it is necessary both for their own spiritual survival and for the continuity of the Dreaming for their spiritual power to become once again a part of the ancestral dimension. Part of the objective of mortuary rituals is to ensure that the soul returns to the ancestral past to rejoin those reservoirs of spiritual power whence it came. Once its journey has been completed, it becomes a source of spiritual power and many returns as new conception spirits to initiate the birth of a new generation.

Aboriginal conceptions of the spirit world are complex, as in most human societies. Myths and ritual practices represent ways of grasping at the problems posed by death and in their details are of necessity inprecise. As the Yonlngu artist Dundiwuy Wananmbi said to me: "We will only find out when we die." The apparent contradictions that exist in Aboriginal religion-conflicting theories of spiritual existence and the fate of the soul, how the soul of the dead can have more than one destination, how a person may or may not be a reincarnation of another, and how a person may reflect the identity of multiple Dreamtime ancestors or be the product of what might be the case, attempt to create concrete images of processes that only occur on the edges of the imagination and are never fully part of human experience.

-continue from the book 'Art, Religion, and the Dreaming'

Aboriginal and Christianity

  

What a friend we have in Jesus?

White man came
With a Bible in his hands
Ransacked my culture
Dispossessed my lands

Then he closed his eyes
And said 'amen'
Broke his bread
Then shared it with his children.

Forced Jesus
Into my mind
My mind was wild
Forced Jesus into my heart
My heart was wild
Forced Jesus into my body
My body was wild
Forced Jesus into my soul
My soul was wild.

I became angry
I became confused
You say He is good
But I was abused.

Are you black Jesus?
Are you being used?

Did they crucify you to share my blues?
White man came
With a Bible in his hand.

Now Jesus is my brother
He was traded for my land.

Poem by K L Burns, MRRC Silverwater Correctional Centre

 __________________________________________________________________
This was a poem I found when I was working on my research project for my mission trip coming up this November 13.  Most Western colonists were Christians and as it is written in the poem, on the one hand, they had Bibles carried with them, and on the other hand, they had rifle/sword to conquer.
Such irony but this was the truth. The pain, sorrow, hurt..among the Aboriginals..
People are wearing masks to fake themselves and others in the name of Love but this needs to stop. 

Dreaming and Aboriginal Art

Concept of Aboriginal Art:
According to Morphy in his book 'Aboriginal Art', Aboriginal art is both the product of dreaming and a way of making contact with this spiritual dimension. The term dreaming or dreamtime arose out of attempt by early anthropologists to trasnlate Aboriginal concepts into English and out of Aboriginal attempts to explain their religious values to European colonists.
The word dreaming and dreamtime, however should not be undertstood in their ordinary English sense but as to a unique and complex religious concept of Aboriginal culture.
In Aboriginal sense, the dreaming is as much a dimension of reality as a period of time. It gains its sense of time because it was there in the beginning, underlies the present and it is a determinant of the future: it is time in the sense that once there was only Dreamtime.
But the Dreamtime has never ceased to exist, and from the viewpoint of the present it is as much a feature of the future as it is of the past. And the Dreamtime is as concerned with space as with time: it refers to origins and powers that are located in places and things. 

Aboriginal Belief & Religion:
Aboriginal belief system or religion has a lot to do with the relationship between humans, animals and Dreamtime beings (we can call this ancestral thing) and this belief system differs from one part of Australia to another.
However, in most if not all Aboriginal religion there was a time of world creation before humans existed on earth. Ancestral beings (or Dreamtime beings) emerged from within the earth and began to give shape to the world.
The ancestral beings were complex forms capable of transforming their own bodies. Many of them were based on the shapes of creatures such as the kangaroo, emu, possum, caterpillar or inanimate objects such as rocks, trees. Some still on whole complexes of existence such as bushfires or beehives and honey.
Transformation and acceptance were the key points in these Dreamtime things.
If they were boulders they could run, if they were trees they could walk, of they were fish they could move on land or dive beneath the surface of the earth. Frequently, these dreamtime things could transform from animal, to human, to inanimate form, and into a rock.
They lived as humans do today but on a grander scale, and their actions had grander consequences. For instance, there was a great battle between groups of ancestral beings, and where their dead bodies laid down, it became hills, and lake formed from pools of their blood.
Over time the features of the earth began to take shape, and as long as the ancestral beings lived on the surface of the earth they modified its form little by little.  

Aboriginal religion is concerned with the continuities that lie behind dynamic processes and produce new lives, with stability in a world of acknowledged change. It is this accommodation of change and process that enabled Aboriginal religion to maintain its relevance in a rapidly changing world.

-Art, Religion, and the Dreaming- 

I Forgive You

Bindi Cole, a Melbourne based artist of Wathaurung heritage, has produced a short video clip called 'Seventy times Seven' in 2011. The video shares the idea of forgiveness by having members of Aboriginal community chanting 'I forgive You' and as they repeat the words, their focus turns inwards: they find within themselves the sources of their hurt and the reasons for its forgiveness. Then there is a shift: the frowns turns to smiles, then to tears- as they begin to free themselves of their internalised pain.

Cole has named her work 'Seventy times seven' which is referenced from the Bible, Matthew chapter 18. It is the number of times Jesus tells his disciples that one should forgive his brothers' and sisters' sins.

Cole continued to explore forgiveness in her latest work 'I Forgive You (2012)'.