Two old artists looking for shellfish

This is the fourth exhibition in which John Wolseley and Mulkun Wirrpanda have joined forces to make work about the living world of East Arnhem Land.  Their installation Midawarr/Harvest about the edible plants of the region, is currently touring around Australia, and now in this show there is a new body of work about the tidal reaches and mangrove swamps of the Arafura Sea.  It's first showing was at Geelong Gallery in May 2019.  In late 2017 Mulkun turned her attention to Maypal - the shellfish of vital importance to her people. Once again her aim is to pass on to future generations her vast knowledge of the cultural and nutritional value of these creatures. At about the same time in 2017, John also found himself infatuated with molluscs and insects; making drawings and relief prints and rubbings of the burrowings and engravings, which the larvae of beetles and moths make under the bark of the trees around his home in Central Victoria.

He thinks that this strange obsession was set in motion in 2009 when Mulkun adopted him as her wawa or brother, and gave him the name of Läŋgurrk – a larval grub which lives in mud and the wood of trees. This led him to the other beetle species which live within the Mangrove trees of Arnhem Land as well as the shellfish which cling to their trunks and branches. In 2018, he concentrated on the fabled and feared Teredo or mangrove worm which gnaw their way through the trunks and limbs of trees and through the hulls of ships. In fact, until the end of the eighteenth century this hungry mollusc sunk most of the European ships before they could reach Australia.

In this exhibition, John has incorporated strange fretted prints and frottages into large paintings of the living dynamic of a mangrove swamp with its marine creatures, swags of sea weed, fish, trepang and molluscs, surging back and forth within the great diurnal tides of the Arafura Sea. In Umwelt – The life world of the Mangrove oyster, the Teredo worm and the Giant Marbled eel, he has made a painting which describes the ‘life worlds’ of various creatures - how they carve and engrave their paths and burrow through mud, sand and the wood of trees. He calls these paintings ‘inscapes’ rather than ‘landscapes’ and emphasises how they are about the inner movement of the life of the land rather than its surface or outer appearance.

The works by Mulkun are rich distillations of the biomes of these saline swamps – each larrakitj or bark painting is a kind of ecosystem in macrocosm. For instance, in Balkpalk ga Guyita, Mulkun has painted Balkpalk – native peanut – with its rich red seedpods which is host to a large longicorn beetle. Mulkun is here celebrating the time she and John found a number of these delicious grubs which were later eaten by several of the artists working in the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre.

Swirling round the larrakitj poles Mulkun has painted the teeming life of the Arafura Sea. There are trepang (Dharripa), mangrove jacks (Ngarrawu), hermit crabs (Nokaliya), goannas (Djanda), water rats (Nyiknyik) and seaweed (Djewul). There are all manner of shellfish - baler shells (Garrtjpa) mud mussels, and the giant black-lipped oyster. Sometimes the larrakitj itself is symbolic – as in Dhalimbu Gaṉ’kurr Milinydjura where the opening in the pole represents the mouth of Dhalimbu, the fluted giant clam – a shellfish of sacred importance in song and ceremony. 

Here is the brochure from Australian Galleries ...

TwoOldArtistsLookingForShellfish

...and the catalogue from the exhibition at Geelong Gallery 

john-wolseley-and-mulkun-wirrpanda-geelong