Midawarr/Harvest: The Art of Mulkun Wirrpanda and John Wolseley

National Museum of Australia, Canberra

 

The Exhibition

Midawarr/Harvest: The Art of Mulkun Wirrpanda and John Wolseley, was launched on 23 November at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra and is the culmination of an extraordinary friendship between two of Australia’s most distinguished senior artists, celebrating their shared obsession with traditional Yolŋu plant use. In 2009, Mulkun adopted Wolseley as her ‘wawa’ (brother) and in the following years they harvested, painted and illustrated over 40 species of edible plants.

The exhibition features a specially commissioned vast panoramic scroll painting of a floodplain (10m x 2m) by John, alongside 80 paintings and painted poles by Mulkun showcasing intricately detailed Yolŋu plants. Mulkun is passionate about passing on the important knowledge of these plants to a younger generation to counteract their dependence on junk food. Wolseley’s immersive landscape portrays a distant floodplain and features the same plants and trees which Mulkun has painted.

The Book

While the exhibition is  a kind of three-dimensional rendering of the East Arnhem Land flora, the  sumptuously illustrated book could be described as a contemporary Australian version of the great Botanical Floras. The book includes descriptions of the plants in Yolŋu as well as English and is both a wonderful art book and a publication that can be used as a resource for plant identification in the field.

Mulkun Wirrpanda said, “Once I started painting food plants without reference to their sacred identity, I had to find a new way to paint. I could not use the miny’tji (sacred design) or steal the sacred identity of the plants which belonged to clans other than my own. So I had to find a marwat (crosshatched background) which was just wakinŋu (ordinary) but not just infill. So I had to let the plants tell me what their secular identity or character was.”

John Wolseley said, "I have tried to find a way in which a painter from another culture could make a work about a site of power and sacred importance and do so with reticence and reverence. Over the years I have drawn the  distant  floodplain of Garranali through the trees and  hanging vines on the edge of the rainforest . I have painted the land at one remove, as seen through a veil.

Midawarr/Harvest: The Art of Mulkun Wirrpanda and John Wolseley is on until 18 February, 2018.

To buy the book visit the NMA shop online 

http://shop.nma.gov.au/midawarr-harvest-the-art-of-mulkun-wirrpanda-and-john-wolseley.html

Listen to John Wolseley and contributing author Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs discussing the project with Michael Cathcart on Radio National

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/midawarr-harvest/9185476

Watch Creative Cowboy's documentary video of John talking about the Midawarr project

https://www.creativecowboyfilms.com/movies/two-old-artists-looking-for-food

 

Origin of the painting: Distant glimpses of the great floodplain seen through a veil of trees and hanging vines, 2017

In June 2009 I was standing with a group of artists on the edge of the great floodplain of Garaŋarri. We were looking through a jungly frieze of rainforest trees hung with trailing vines and all manner of climbing plants. In the hazy distance we could see where the monsoon rains had left pools and flood debris. Further away were the dim ovals of middens and the dark voluminous shapes of the sacred rripipi or banyan trees.

Further upstream were the lands of the Madarrpa clan where the ancestor Barama had emerged and distributed the law, sacred clan designs and ritual objects. Great artists such as Gunybi Ganambarr, Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, MulkunWirrpanda and Djambawa Marawili still live there and strongly continue the Yolŋu traditions and ritual observances of their land.

It was Djambawa who had brought us here to the edge of the floodplain, and who now recounted some of these stories. He told us how in the dawn of creation a number of ancestor women had come from the coast and were moving up the floodplain. Where they dug for edible roots there had burst forth springs of fresh water which are still running. As he was singing this story he told how, as the sun rose up over the dark earth, these ancestor figures turned into brolga cranes. He gestured towards the distant source of the floodplain, and as his arm moved across it a great stream of cranes flew slowly and majestically towards the sea.

In this painting I have sought to describe that moment in time. I have drawn onto the long scroll of paper the brolgas as they flew down the floodplain behind the screen of trees and vines.