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Indigenous artists light up Paris

By Martin Buzacott

Musee du Quai Branley

Aboriginal art at the Musee du Quai Branley

29 July 2006 - Walk in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower at any hour of the day or night and you'll find it hard to miss the work of Brisbane artist Judy Watson.

"It's a very different sort of public art project," says the Mundubbera-born artist, whose work also graces the Brisbane Magistrate's Court and Sydney International Airport, and who has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and National Gallery of Australia.

"The curators and the architects had already spoken about the artists and the actual work that they might present before bringing the idea to the artists themselves," she says.

The brainchild of visionary architect Jean Nouvel, the new indoor/outdoor, public/private concept for the museum dedicated to the art and civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, was championed from the outset by French President Jacques Chirac, who approached the Australian Government to commission the artists.

Curator Hetti Perkins was already familiar with Watson's diverse artistic interests, from an exhibition in Oxford featuring the Queenslander's work, and approached her to be part of the team that would build Australian art into the architectural fabric of the museum's new building.

"A project I did for the Museum of Victoria measured 50 metres by 2.2 metres, so I was familiar with the process," the former Townsville schoolteacher says of the complex task of covering entire walls and ceilings with original artwork. "The ceiling design was taken from an existing work of mine called Two Halves With Bailer Shell that the National Gallery owns."

The Paris ceiling is ultramarine Prussian blue in colour, "almost like liquid sky – the colour of dreams and of the unconscious".

It's backed on to shiny stainless steel and lights are directed at it, so it takes on an appearance almost like a stained-glass window.

Such illumination has been a recurring theme in Watson's recent work, including decorating bus shelters during the Sydney Opera House's Message Sticks exhibition in 2003.

"It was beautiful, especially at night," she says of the exhibition which removed advertising from the shelters around Circular Quay and replaced them with original illuminated artworks.

"It was almost a filmic moment because the art had light passing through it. The light's important to many artists, whether you're working in glass or even watercolour, and certainly in print-making, which is my background. You're constantly working with the surface and the matrix is the light that's put across it."

It has been a busy few months for the direct descendant of the Waanyi people of northwest Queensland.

Recently she has been been working with other artists and an ethno-botanist in the Daly River area, and has completed new work for the Clemenger exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in August.

At the moment she's in Paris, where the new Quai Branly Museum building officially opens on Tuesday.

"Artists are cultural travellers," she says. "We're always going out and sieving and netting things. You bring things to the surface and then you sieve again."

She has exhibited and worked overseas in the past, including spending a year in France on a Moet et Chandon Fellowship in 1995-96.

"Being away from my own country makes me closer to my own culture because you somehow understand yourself and what's important to you. Memories and dreams become a lot stronger," Watson says.

That power of memory drives much of her work, not just in the public art projects but in the many other media in which she also works.

In 1990, she had a decisive return to her grandmother's country, piecing together her cultural heritage.

Ever since, there's been an almost forensic quality to much of her work, with architectural grids layered over some pieces, cultural objects from various civilisations juxtaposed one with the other, and middens re-created down to the exact individual shells.

"The references are continual and circulatory," she says.

While she doesn't see herself as exclusively a spokesperson for indigenous culture, she's often surprised that some Australian galleries still need to be convinced that anything other than European work should be exhibited there.

"We're all built on Aboriginal land," she usually tells gallery directors. "You can have other things in your gallery but there's still something which is drawing out from under the ground and that's an incredibly rich history that's there.

"If you tap into it, it's really going to enrich your gallery and the public and the people who work in the program. It will build amazing community relationships within that area. That's the thing people need to recognise."

Watson's favourite work of public art is a work by Mischa Ullman called The Empty Library.

"In late 1995 I was in Berlin. It was very cold and I was walking across the Bebelplatz where the burning of the books had occurred. Israeli artist Mischa Ullman had been commissioned to create a work in this very potent public space.

"There was this light that was glowing from the ground and when you walked across to it, you saw a glass square. Below were empty bookshelves. It was so strong."

The Australian Indigenous Art Commission (AIAC), featuring work by Lena Nyadbi, Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford, Judy Watson, Gulumbu Yunupingu, John Mawurndjul, Tommy Watson, Ningura Napurrula and the late Michael Riley, opened in Paris on June 20.

Source: NEWS.com.au

relative links :

• Musee du Quai Branly website link
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