Intertidal

INTERTIDAL

Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi

Intertidal - artist statement Julie Gough

May 2005

Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi

3/75 Flinders Lane

Melbourne

http://www.gabriellepizzi.com.au/

Intertidal is an exhibition that visually articulates how I have been feeling since I left Australia in September 2001 for a year of residencies and since that date have undergone a non stop array of personal, employment and life changing experiences.

The only constant in my life seems to be an endless sense of movement somewhat like the tides. This connection with the seas and salt waters gives me some courage and much comfort and I feel its pull wherever I am. This is likely why I am now living five house distances from the beach in Townsville. I created my first significant Intertidal work in 2003 at ANU for the <ABSTRACTIONS> exhibition http://www.anu.edu.au/culture/abstractions/artists/jg_1.htm because this sense of being

pulled in different directions, living between and within varied states and places then conveyed and still best conveys the mysteries of place, seeming coincidence and the relief and release of locating story and medium in my everyday.

Some of the works in this exhibition are celebratory and peaceful renditions of my inner state of being, in flux,

between land and sea, not settled in new places, but testing waters and finding much. Other pieces that pair with these emotive painted renditions are ink jet print critical responses to the commodification of Indigenous art and process through the digitalisation of time, space and identities.

"Intertidal" is an exhibition, like those past, about me now navigating my reality. Consisting of reflections in to the

Julie Gough Lifebearer, 2005

Beach found pumice, brass wire, driftwood 100 x 60 x 34 cm

Drift, 2005 Driftwood, nylon 130 x 90 x 20 cm

Acquired National Gallery of Victoria

Julie Gough Seam, 2005

Beach found coal, nylon 130 x 90 x 15 cm

"Some commentary about the necklace works: Drift, Seam, Lifebearer and Raft and Transmitting Device in my solo exhibition: Intertidal at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi 10 May – 4 June 2005”

Julie Gough May 2005

I like to think about what it means for me to make necklaces that are bigger-than-me; that are not necessarily beautiful and not clearly necklaces either ... I ask is the traditional Tasmanian Aboriginal shell necklace today a carefully

maintained sign of cultural continuity, connectivity, authenticity and authority and if so is this different to what it

represented 200 years + ago ? - my answer is that I can't know what it once was and provided outside of my own time and perspective. My use of macro [and maybe future micro scale works] are about that navigation of myself in my work = physically challenging myself, my arms, my lifting, my body - around traditional practice, place, materiality and cultural expectation of what something is used for/is supposed to "DO".

These floating medium necklace forms work for me as life Preservers ie: operating perhaps as memory retainers for people on the edge (the peripheral me - the whole interstitial 'bit') . The wood and the pumice necklaces - "drift" and

"lifebearer” seem very much to me about returning home (to Tasmania) sometime. They are my evidence to me that I have an emergency means - a facility - to make a craft tobring me home in the form of a necklace - a magical necklace. I feel I can (in my mind's eye) walk into Townsville beach with these wrapped around me and float into the sea and wash up back in North East Tasmania.

I feel that when I am collecting these materials - that if I lose almost everything of myself - even the possibility

of asking for help to return , If I cannot articulate my need in cogent language to explain my need to return - that I could still, if I can stay near a beach - make the means of my return – these necklaces or a raft... My sense is that if I drowned with these around me it would be in the arms of the sea and the maker of all necklaces and would be peaceful. I was rescued off a rock I was stranded on off Rodrigues Island in 2002 - after near drowning - I so nearly drowned - was embraced by the dark, warm drift downwards - that I don't fear or question the sea's ability to decide when

to take someone.

have to encounter to be able to walk properly and cross into the two worlds that I have trained myself to tightrope 'between'. The coal necklace - the seam - is like the weighty lifeblood of ancestry - the coal black materiality of the earth that I haven't answered nor perhaps recognised the call. The coal coming to me from the sea is a bit like a reminder to face the land and remember responsibility to all sides of self - land and waters.

The necklace-like works operate as my imaginings of how to merge and move myself around (kind of like with time and tide) back to from where I come. The necklaces are elemental ways of re-joining myself back to traditions that seem lost in their recognisable popularised makings in my immediate family. The necklace and multiple object in my art forms (over a decade) articulate my connection to a culture that did collect (and still does collect) to survive. Through repetition and rhythm and staccato in my work a language of understanding place and being-ness is articulated and presented to outsiders. In this way I offer viewers a way into forms such as necklaces - and materials provided by nature impact on me, seem to urge me to spell out myself through them.

The Transmitting Device represents, for me, a means of sending my thoughts back to my people/the old people and homeland and also it is by extension a Receiving Device for hearing back from home. It is an apparatus of

travel/communication through time and place - whether actual or providing for me the security of imagining possible what this device promises to achieve - see website (http://homes.jcu.edu.au/~jc156215/) - see work "Time Capsules (Bitter Pills)" that is a work about the all consuming (literally in that artwork) need to travel back to times of old people to feel what it is/was like - to be THERE.

I made Time Capsules in the Eddystone Residency mid 2001 - whilst sitting on beach and grabbed a cuttlefish and suddenly carved a pile of these tablets as though in a manic yet trancelike state ! - those pills evidenced/materialised this desire for my impossible return to past of my imagining - where I could dive deftly for abalone, climb for possum, sing in language that came out of country and sang true - unlike the tongue that I now speak that I suspect would have me killed by my old people if they didn't see I was them. Word and voice wouldn't save me in my current form/manifestation (out of man – sealer Briggs) - only action and evidenced/trace of recognised behaviour could rescue me from swift death. RAFT is a raft - I feel great making things that are about movements and travel through real and imagined TIME/SPACE back to Tasmania and to a place in Tasmania and a community of people there where I can be myself and it would be called home.

As an artist I am a outsider in my own culture/s - alwayslooking in or across at peoples/places/times and figuring

through art making my responses to being where I am and how or determining whether I wish to show that place I inhabit ='me' in relation to that other place (mainstream society) or whether I rework cultural matters from my own perspective.

Julie Gough

Land and Sky from Sea 1, 2005 Oxides and inks on canvas 82 x 43 cm

Acquired National Gallery of Victoria

Julie Gough

Land and Sky from Sea 2, 2005 Oxides and inks on canvas 80 x 52 cm

Transmitting Device

, 2005

Lomandra longifolia, limpets

40 x 25 x 25 cm

Julie Gough

Raft, 2005

Driftwood, lomandra longifolia 185 x 63 x 15 cm

Acquired: private collection

Julie Gough

Raft, 2005

Regeneration, 2005 Bronze, eucalypt branch

Regeneration is the result of an opportunity to work both indoors and outdoors at Chewton in the Victorian Goldfields in 2004 and 2005 courtesy of Andrea and Peter Hylands. Over a year of visiting that place I developed ideas as to what form an outdoor art work could take that would not elementally disturb the environment of that area that is distinguishable by eruptions of quartz signalling former alluvial mining activities.

The quartz brought ideas of memorial and memory, like bone it surfaces to reveal what is never totally concealed about the actions of the past. I eventually placed quartz onsite adjacent to a state forest such a way that the elements would eventually regain their hold on the form created to move and remove it from whatever story I invoked and impressed it into. Quartz is a magical and potent material existing before and outliving human time. Sensing that this aspect of timelessness was central to my appreciation of the material enabled me to understand into what form to configure the quartz. Nature to nature, place to place, within me I carry some knowledge, some blood, some cultural memory of my ancestors.

One ancestor, Woretermoeteyenner, was a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman who travelled widely during her life, meeting and working with people of many cultures through the first half of the 1800s. Woretermoeteyenner means a eucalypt leaf and I always feel strongly connected to this ancestor in the presence of these majesterial beings. Before moving far north to Townsville I realised that a

representation of a Tasmanian eucalypt leaf would be an object, placed, left signalling my visit that I could ably make to leave behind outside as an ephemeral marker in a marked place, from and of that region and yet also from deep within me, my story and past.

Regeneration is an activated form of the quartz installation that remains to wear at Chewton. This branch with its leaves seeming to march upwards and out of a space is able to be carried and live indoors or out whilst it traces and takes me and my connections to people and place onwards. The trail of six bronze eucalyptus leaves tracking up a length of timber provide a different means of memorial than the more unstructured external quartz leaf that changes with every rain. The golden bronze of each leaf references also the alluvial goldfields of Chewton and the alchemical magic of molten metal. Each cast leaf also traces the generations from Woretermoeteyenner to me, the same leaf, our regeneration.

Promissory Note ~ Opposite Swan Island, 2005

Tea-tree, timber, string, fur 229 h x 240 w x 130 d cm

Julie Gough, 2005

Promissory note – opposite Swan Island

229 h x 240 w x 130 d cm

Opposite Swan Island on the north east corner of Tasmania on 6th August 1831 at least one of my ancestors was made a crucial promise by an envoy of the Government that has not been kept… we are waiting…

George Augustus Robinson 6th August 1831:

This morning I developed my plans to the chief Mannalargenna and explained to him the benevolent views of the government towards himself and people.

He cordially acquiesced and expressed his entire approbation of the salutary measure, and promised his utmost aid and assistance.

I informed him in the presence of Kickerterpoller that I was commissioned by the Governor to inform them that, if the natives would desist from their wonted outrages upon the whites,

they would be allowed to remain in their respective districts and would have flour, tea and sugar, clothes &c given them;

that a good white man would dwell with them who would take care of them and would not allow any bad white man to shoot them, and he would go about the bush like myself and they then could hunt. He was much delighted.

The chief and the other natives went to hunt kangaroo: returned with some swan's eggs

which the chief presented me as a present from himself - this was an instance of gratitude seldom met with from the whites.

In 1994 I first made note of those words found on page 394 of 1073 pages in the

1966 mammoth transcription by N.J.B. Plomley of George Augustus Robinson’s

journal. In 1996 my first artwork clearly based on the incomplete transaction, our

unfinished business :

Shadow of the Spear

was completed. The words from this

diary extract sang strong when I visited the area of that verbal and inscribed promise

six generations later to realise that looking across to Swan Island brought much

personal anguish about losses and absences. Standing there, alone at that place,

also brought vivid clarity about the importance of remembering what has gone

before. I realised during the making of

Shadow of the Spear

that I had a path and

task set; that of translati ng into inviting and approachable visual art forms the written

and subsumed histories of cultural invasion, collision and trauma that has plagued

Tasmania, Australia and Indigenous peoples everywhere.

Four years after Robinson made that promise Mannarlargenna was exiled from his

homeland to Flinders Island in Bass Strait - where most Tasmanian Aboriginal

people were shipped who survived the first 30 years of invasion. On the journey

across, after stopping at Swan Island, Mannarlargenna held a telescope and studied

his country with great intent as it grew ever smaller. Mooring next at Green Island

Mannarlargenna cut off all his hair, symbolic of great loss. Mannarlargenna died on

Flinders Island one month later from what was medically diagnosed as pneumonia.

same moment and day of a promise later seen to be empty and reworks things present of the place and transaction into visual art : Tea tree, time, memory, light and dark, words burnt into memory and string that binds. My understanding is that

Tasmanian Aboriginal people on that day were promised that if they put down their weapons, here taken to mean spears, they would, in return, be able to live and hunt freely in their country ever more. Robinson is making explicit his, and by extension as an employed representative of the British Government, the Official understanding that Tasmanian Aboriginal people clearly recognised and held ownership and rights to their own country. They laid their spears down in surrender as a clear response to this and other such 'promises' in order to regain responsibility for and free

movements across their respective lands.

In Promissory note – opposite Swan Island tea tree sticks activate story and place from the past into a pointed formation reminiscent of a light. They metaphorically track movement through time of countless unlit firesticks. Awaiting re-ignition these bare bones of traditional means of warmth, light, meals shared and stories told have been essentially extinguished over the past 200 years through the actions of

European invasion. The tea tree sticks also resemble a glowing ball of artificial light that emanates today from Swan Island lighthouse. Built in 1842 some years after the events I am referring to, its light powerfully cuts into the dark of the night across my north eastern coastal country today and for me ties past and present together as it sears the skies. The stick of symbolic light is placed geographically in the work at the point on the silhouette of Swan Island where the lighthouse is located in actuality. The tea tree sticks also take the form of a dandelion, symbolically blown by some cultures to make wish come true, as I today often do in reflection of this promise and how it could have been and never was.

The winds and the plants and the rocks still hold secrets and lies told to and by people, the loneliness and windswept beauty of my sleeping country is in barren form in this work about the loss in remembering what no longer is.

Julie Gough 13 February 2005

Ref 1: Robinson, G.A., Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers (of) George Augustus Robinson, 1829 - 1834, ed. N.J.B. Plomley, Tasmanian Historical Research Society, Hobart, 1966.

Julie Gough

Intertidal Zone, 2005

crushed cuttlefish, crushed beach found charcoal, beach oxides, beach graphite, wax on nine pieces of timber

220 x 300 x130 cm

Intertidal, 2005

found ground cuttlefish, charcoal, graphite, oxides, ground pumice, bought oxide on canvas 106 x 140 cm

Julie Gough Me-bay, 2005

Digital print on canvas 77 x 105 cm

Me-bay, 2005

Digital print on canvas 77 x 105 cm

Acquired: private collection

Tidal, 2005

Beach found, crushed cuttlefish, oxides, charcoal, graphite, bought oxide on canvas

86 x 107 cm

Julie Gough

Intertidal Drift, 2005

Beach found ground cuttlefish, charcoal, graphite, oxides, pumice, bought oxide on canvas

70 x 96 cm

Acquired: private collection

Resignation, 2005 Digital print on canvas 82 x 116 cm

and

Me-bay, 2005

Digital print on canvas 77 x 105 cm

“Opening EBAY recently I looked up the category of “Aboriginal Art” to find many dozens of paintings for auction that are authenticated by the inclusion of an obviously Aboriginal person holding up said painting/s in unknown backyard/s to unknown photographer/s. Photo after photo of unimpressed-looking people presented (for me) a scene of depressing resignation. The subjects of the photos became objects of commodification alongside their art making. Thinking about the intent of the photos I wondered whether the artists may not be holding up their own work but that of forgers. I fear that forgers may be paying increasingly famous Aboriginal artists to sign a pile of pre-produced paintings and to be photographed holding up each in a production line of profitable abuse. I decided to be photographed in my yard holding one of my own paintings. Fortuitously, one of these photographs was taken by the manager of an Aboriginal arts centre who was staying with me at the time and understood with mirth and grief what I was trying to say. I am an

Aboriginal artist. My pale-skinned presence in the photographs may ironically serve to de-authenticate the “Aboriginality” of the painting I am holding and thus reduce its perceived value. I am resigned!”.

Julie Gough

Limpet, 2005 (and detail)

Beach found ground cuttlefish, beach found ground charcoal, linen stitching on canvas

Cowrie, 2005

Beach found oxides, bought oxides, beeswax, eucalyptus oil, ground shells on canvas

73 x 102 cm

Julie Gough is a visual artist working predominantly in sculpture and installation art who is also currently employed as a Lecturer in Visual Arts at James Cook University, Townsville. Julie’s art and research practice involves

uncovering and re-presenting historical stories as part of an ongoing project that questions and re-evaluates the impact of the past on our present lives. Much of her sculptural work refers to her own and her family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people and is concerned with developing a visual language to express and engage with conflicting and subsumed histories. A central intention of Julie’s art is to invite a viewer to a closer understanding of our continuing roles in,

and proximity to unresolved National stories.

“My work revisits sites of history and memory often recorded only in text. I rework versions of the past from between the lines, seeking voices and direction in a detective-like search for alternative and visual means of representation. I sculpt as my way to retrieve the forgotten or unspoken narratives of this nation, and to invite the viewer to engage with stories and implications perhaps not otherwise voluntarily approached.” Julie Gough, 1999

Since undertaking a solo artist residency (Arts Tasmania Wilderness Residency, Eddystone Light, 2001) in her maternal (Trawlwoolway) ancestral homeland of Tebrikunna in far north east Tasmania Julie Gough’s work has evolved into more personal, introspective musings about intangible states of being. Formerly hard-edged sometimes satirical political commentary about race and identity today Julie Gough’s work reflects [on] both internal and external states of being and negotiation.

“I am interested in shorelines; the places between past and present, day and night, conscious and unconscious. My art making navigates these spaces of evocation in an effort to trigger re-surfacings of cultural memories beyond habituated contemporary frameworks that distrust the sensorial. My feeling is that there is something ‘other’ through which

humans individually mediate the world. Working with this spirit of our presence provides me meaning, reason and a way (art making) to engage with the often detached exteriorised public world. My intention is to investigate and provide new ways to reflect upon and hence understand places of time, memory, history and the past within a personal present.” Julie Gough, 2001

Julie Gough’s first major exhibiting opportunity was Perspecta 1995, curated by Judy Annear, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and that same year Gabrielle Pizzi invited Julie to exhibit in Melbourne for the first time in the exhibition New

Faces – New Directions. Since that initial group showing Julie has exhibited in solo exhibitions at Gallery Gabrielle

Pizzi on three occasions : Heartland in 2001, Re-collections in 1997 and Dark Secrets/Home Truths in 1996. Since 1994 Julie Gough has exhibited in over eighty exhibitions, nationally and internationally and Julie’s work is represented in collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, The National Museum Australia, Canberra, Mildura Arts Centre, Victoria, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, City of Port Phillip, Victoria.

Julie has previously been employed as a Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, a lecturer in Aboriginal studies at Riawunna at the University of Tasmania and as an Interpretation Officer, Aboriginal Culture at the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service. Other experiences include Co-judging the annual Telstra NATSIAA (National

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards) Awards hosted by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in 2004, co-judging the National Interpretation Awards, Australia 2004 and as Tasmanian representative on the

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council, 2003.

Julie has undertaken artist residencies in Tasmania (Wilderness Residency, Arts Tasmania, 2001), New York (Greene St Studio, Australia Council for the Arts, 2002, London (Samstag Scholarship, MVA, University of London 1997-8), Paris

and Mauritius (Commonwealth Award, 2001-2) and was awarded a PhD from the University of Tasmania in 2001 (Transforming Histories: the visual disclosure of contentious pasts, 2000), MFA (University of London, Goldsmith’s College,1998), BFA 1st class Honours (University of Tasmania 1994), BVA (Curtin University, 1993) and BA (Prehistory and English Literature, UWA, 1986).

Selected websites:

Paintings on canvas

‘Tidal’, 2005

beach found ground cuttlefish, charcoal, graphite, oxides,pumice, bought oxide on canvas 86 x 107 cm

‘Intertidal’, 2005

found ground cuttlefish, charcoal, graphite, oxides,grit, bought oxide on canvas 106 x 140 cm

‘Intertidal Drift’, 2005

Beach found ground cuttlefish, charcoal, graphite, oxides,grit, bought oxide on canvas 70 x 96 cm

‘Cowrie’, 2005

beach found ground graphite, beach found ground oxides,beach found ground shell grit, bought oxides, beeswax, eucalyptus oil on canvas

73 x 102 cm ‘Limpet’, 2005

beach found ground cuttlefish, beach found ground charcoal,linen stitching on canvas 102 x 77 cm

‘Land and Sky from Sea’, 1 oxides and inks on canvas 82 x 43 cm

‘Land and Sky from Sea’, 2 oxides and inks on canvas 80 x 52 cm

Sculptures

‘Intertidal Zone’, 2005

Beach found ground cuttlefish, charcoal, graphite, oxides,grit, bought oxide on timber 220 x 300 x 130 cm

‘Drift’, 2005 driftwood, nylon 130 x 90 x 20 cm ‘Lifebearer’, 2005

beach found pumice*, brass wire *floated from Tonga region eruption which occurred 2 years ago 100 x 60 x 34 cm

‘Seam’, 2005

beach found coal, nylon 130 x 90 x 15cm

‘Promissory Note ~ Opposite Swan Island’, 2005 timber, tea tree, possum fur, string, pyrography 230 x 250 x 100 cm (approx.)

‘Regeneration’, 2005 eucalypt branch, bronze 210 x 8 x 140 cm (approx.) ‘Transmitting Device’, 2005

limpets, lomandra longfolia, driftwood 40 x 25 x 25 cm

‘Raft’, 2005

driftwood, lomandra

‘Me-Bay’, 2005

digital print on canvas 77 x 105 cm

‘Resignation’, 2005 digital print on canvas 87 x 115 cm

‘Raft’, 2005