The University’s Ian Potter Museum of Art is hosting an exhibition of rare Aboriginal bark paintings collected by University anthropologist Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land in the 1940s.
At a time of great unrest and mistrust in Arnhem Land, Donald Thomson was a pioneer, walking into central and eastern Arnhem Land without any weapons and meeting a member of the Dhuwa people, Djapu man Wonggu. Wonggu created one of the exhibition’s central works as a pictorial representation of his life and his people so that Thomson could better understand.
Thomson’s interest in Wonggu’s artistic practices “was a way of entering that world”, Senior Curator of the exhibition Lindy Allen explained.
He “looked at the use of perspective, the use of abstract designs and representative forms and explored their meanings”.
Thomson was the first anthropologist to explore the emotional and aesthetic underpinnings of Aboriginal art, and the exhibition, Ancestral power and the Aesthetic, shows 20 of the 50 works that were made for him. They demonstrate the importance of concept of bir’ yun (shine, or brilliance) in the art of the Yirritja and Dhuwa peoples of Arnhem Land.
Water is central to the spiritual life of the Yirritja and the Dhuwa, and bir’yun represents the shine off a body of water, where their ancestors live.
“This was how the world was constructed, and ancestors and minytji (specific clan motifs) underpin their artistic practice,” Ms Allen said.
And as well as explaining the lives and art of the Yirritja and Dhuwa peoples, the bark paintings are “really quite extraordinarily beautiful”.
This beauty is emphasised by the surrounds – the Ian Potter Museum of
Art is an ideal location in which to exhibit such large and vibrant works, and it is appropriate that the collection is shown in the place where it all started. Thomson studied Botany and Zoology at the University of Melbourne graduating in 1925, and the University owns the bark paintings on display, having been gifted by his wife in 1970.
Ancestral power and the Aesthetic: Arnhem Land paintings and objects from the Donald Thomson Collection is showing at the ‘Potter’ until the end of August.
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