Exhibition Insight... Rekkan / Tamuwu / Nyinakati (sit/sit down)
Daniel Emma and Raylene Bonson, Love Bench With Back, 2021, powdercoated steel, screen printed canvas wubbunj, 620 x 1100 x 380 mm; Love Bench Without Back, 2021, powdercoated steel, screen printed canvas wubbunj, 620 x 1100 x 380 mm.
Rekkan / Tamuwu / Nyinakati (sit/sit down) showcases the vitality and exuberance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander textile design by interpreting Indigenous fabric onto contemporary upholstered furniture. For this exhibition, three Indigenous textile artists from diverse art centres across the Northern Territory have collaborated with local South Australian furniture and product designers to produce a series of chairs that are upholstered in the artists’ fabrics. Rather than simply translating the artists’ textiles onto an existing furniture form, this iterative design process encourages the symbolic textile designs to shape and inform the structure of the chairs, thereby complementing and continuing the artists’ traditional stories. This collaborative approach to producing this series of chairs offers a new way of engaging with Indigenous material culture and storytelling within the frame of contemporary furniture design.
Words by Caitlin Eyre.
Photography by Dean Toepfer.
KETURAH NANGALA ZIMRAN (IKUNTJI ARTISTS) AND CAREN ELLISS
Luritja–Pintupi artist Keturah Nangala Zimran creates bold, strong and bright textile designs, with fabric selected for this project featuring contrasting colours that depict the sand hills and puli puli (rocks) in the landscape. When designing the form of the armchair, Caren Elliss was greatly attracted to the bold, strong and bright graphical nature of Keturah’s textile design. Resonating with the intergenerational stories of Keturah, her mother and grandmother, Elliss responded to Keturah’s fabric by focusing on curves, particularly those found in the movement of the wind in the sand hills and the shape of the rocks in the landscape. The circular form of the armchair and footrest enclose the sitter in a way that suggests being enveloped by Keturah’s country and offering comfort and safety. “I wanted the furniture to act as a visual anchor, a boulder-like form on which to wrap Keturah’s work and story around, providing a 3D interpretation and a continuance of the visual cues and movement found in Keturah’s work,” Elliss says.[i]
Caren Elliss and Keturah Nangala Zimran, Boulder Chair, 2021, Tuscany linen, Australian Blackwood, 700 x 850 x 850 mm; Boulder Footrest, 2021, Tuscany linen, Australian Blackwood, 450 x 600 mm.
ROSLYN ORSTO (TIWI DESIGNS) AND DEAN TOEPFER
Tiwi artist Roslyn Orsto is renowned for her ochre paintings on canvas and paper that utilise the wooden comb technique. Her vibrant punarika (waterlily) textile design celebrates the presence of waterlilies in the lakes, ponds, rivers and running streams of her homeland as well as the integral role that the plants play in her community as both bush medicines and sources of nourishment.[ii] In realising a new form on which to display Rolsyn’s punarika designs, Dean Toepfer has created two armchairs with a minimalist aesthetic and finishes that depict Tiwi lore relating to the use and stories of punarika. “The first chair represents the calm and nurturing lakes and ponds where waterlilies provide bush medicines and food, while the second depicts the fire that the elders and traditional owners create to calm the Rainbow Serpent that rises if the waterlilies are taken without her permission”, Toepfer says. “Both chairs depict the balance and harmony that the traditional owners managed for millennia.”[iii]
Dean Toepfer and Roslyn Orsto, Pupuni Punarika (Good Waterlily) (black), 2021, Tasmanian Oak, cotton drill, 750 x 670 x 685 mm; Pupuni Punarika (Good Waterlily) (blue), 2021, Tasmanian Oak, cotton drill, 750 x 670 x 685 mm.
RAYLENE BONSON (BÁBBARRA WOMEN’S CENTRE) AND DANIEL EMMA
Ndjébbana–Kuninjku textile artist Raylene Bonson specialises in the linocut printing technique and is renowned for her designs depicting ancestral stories and ceremonial objects, particularly lorrkkon (hollow log for burial ceremony), kunmadj (dillybag) and mandjabu (conical fishtrap).[iv] She was mentored by her late mother, Nancy Gununwanga, a senior textile artist at Bábbarra Designs and a founding member of the Bábbarra Women’s Centre. Her sophisticated silkscreened wubbunj (paperbark canoe/makassan boat) fabric design was inspired by the story of her partner’s father, who travelled with other men from Nakalarramba across the river to Djomi and, upon finding fresh water, settled on the land that became Maningrida.[v] Inspired by and keen to reflect life in and around Maningrida, Emma Aiston and Daniel To have designed foldable utilitarian loveseats that celebrate “the transportable nature of wubbunj and the thought that this is something that can be moved around and used with relative ease.”[vi]
Daniel Emma and Raylene Bonson, Love Bench With Back, 2021, powder coated steel, screen printed canvas wubbunj, 620 x 1100 x 380 mm; Love Bench Without Back, 2021, powder coated steel, screen printed canvas wubbunj, 620 x 1100 x 380 mm.
Rekkan / Tamuwu / Nyinakati (sit/sit down)
Rekkan / Tamuwu / Nyinakati (sit/sit down) is exhibiting in Collect at JamFactory Adelaide until 28 November 2021 as part of Tarnanthi 2021, the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art.
Exhibitors: Raylene Bonson from Bábbarra Women’s Centre in Maningrida, NT and creative duo Daniel To and Emma Aiston from design studio Daniel Emma; Keturah Nangala Zimran from Ikuntji Artists in Haasts Bluff, NT and designer Caren Elliss; Roslyn Orsto from Tiwi Designs in Wurrumiyanga, NT and furniture and lighting designer Dean Toepfer.