New South Wales
SOPHIE HONESS, ARTIST
Jonathan Jones, mentor
Sophie Honess, a Gamilaroi woman living and working on Gomeroi Country in Tamworth, New South Wales, embraced the challenges of translating her Country through her textile and weaving practice, working within the medium of wool to realise her largest tapestries to date. Her mentor is Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi contemporary artist Jonathan Jones. Working across a range of mediums, from printmaking and drawing to sculpture and film, Jones has exhibited nationally and internationally since the late 1990s, utilising everyday materials in minimal repeated forms to explore and interrogate cultural and historical relationships and ideas from Indigenous perspectives and traditions. Jones identified Honess’s work as offering critical insight into ‘pastoral expansion being the primary motivation for the forcible removal and dispossession of Koorie peoples from our country and the destruction of our culture’. Honess’s three tapestries for My Country represent Daruka in Gomeroi Country, each panel reflecting a different environmental feature – the grasses, the creek beds and the sands. Through research that involved going out on Country with knowledge-holder Marc Sutherland and cultural mentor Amy Hammond, Honess has developed a visual language of textures, tones and colours that connect to the layers of Country. Through tufting and latch hooking over 86,000 wool knots into a grid mat, Honess charts the beauty of her Country, which deserves to be appreciated and looked after.
Tasmania
CHERYL ROSE, ARTIST
Denise Robinson, mentor
With the commitment to depicting fragments of cultural landscapes and translating their forms, Cheryl Rose is mentored by Denise Robinson. Both descendants of the Trawlwoolway people of lutruwita/Tasmania, they have been working together on projects for more than fifteen years. As an artist, administrator, adviser, broker, and mentor, Robinson has held a diverse range of roles across government, business, community and industry sectors as well as managing her own arts practice.
Robinson saw this commission as a quintessential opportunity to bring Rose’s practice to the forefront of national discourse and, rather than direct it, she supported Rose’s capacity as a ‘deep listener … to hear the pause when Cheryl spoke about Country and what it meant to her’. Through this process, Rose has realised Fragments, an installation centred on a large-scale work on Japanese Kozo paper. Gently collaged onto its surface are hand-rendered images and archival references to digging materials that were collected from the caves at pinmatik (Rocky Cape) and stored at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in the 1970s. Accompanied by an audiovisual component that provides the atmospheric sounds of this sacred site, the installation emanates the connectedness and emotion Rose gets from her Country that heals her.
Queensland
WARRABA WEATHERALL, ARTIST
Tony Albert, mentor
Also building upon a longstanding relationship but working for the first time towards a specific outcome, Girramay/Yidinji/ Kuku Yalanji man, Tony Albert has selected Warraba Weatherall from the Kamilaroi Nation as his mentee. Drawing on both personal and collective histories, Albert’s multidisciplinary practice considers the ways in which optimism might be utilised to overcome adversity. Albert is the first Indigenous artist on the board of trustees for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In his PhD research, Weatherall considers the relationship between oral and visual languages and responds to the complexities of colonialism and its naturalisation in contemporary society through systems of colonial bureaucracy and linguicide. For My Country Weatherall’s commission builds upon this research and permits time and resources to deeply consider archival materials and undertake new modes of fabrication. His work Dirge is a largescale polyphon that translates oppressive archival documents into braille to form a musical composition. Working with steel and monumental forms, Dirge explores notions of longevity, creation and destruction.
Australian Capital Territory
AIDAN HARTSHORN, ARTIST
James Tylor, mentor
Already friends and professional supports, Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna) and Māori (Te Arawa) man James Tylor identified that the mentorship and exhibition program would be a meaningful space for Aidan Hartshorn, a Walgalu man of the Ngurmal Nation, to develop his modes of making. Tylor is a multi-disciplinary visual artist whose practice explores the Australian environment, culture and social history. These mediums include photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, scents and food. For My Country, Hartshorn builds on research he has undertaken for his master’s degree, which considers the implications of the Snowy Mountains Scheme – Australia’s largest hydroelectricity and irrigation complex, which has and continues to be one of the major causes of decimation on his Country. Hartshorn worked with Canberra Glassworks to fabricate sixteen diamond-shaped glass shields that form an installation. Each shield is suspended in space and weighed down by electrical cords that illuminate them. This tension characterises what Hartshorn terms ‘ghost objects’ – the powerful yet burdened presence of these translucent shields speaking to the ways culture has been removed, obscured and misrepresented through colonial forces.
Western Australia
JAN GRIFFITHS, ARTIST
Peggy Griffiths, mentor
Peggy Griffiths identified the potential of My Country to share cultural and artistic practice and thus chose to mentor her daughter, Jan Griffiths. Both are Miriwoong women from Kununurra in the East Kimberley. Peggy is the first Indigenous artist to win the prestigious Fremantle Print Award and is a highly respected senior artist at Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, teaching other artists as well as contributing to leadership in a director role. The native gerdewoon (boab tree) underpins the premise of Jan’s work. A source of nourishment – from the boab nuts to the water in its hollow trunk – as well as being central to birthing and to stories relating to Miriwoong being and knowing, the multiplicities of gerdewoon as personally and culturally sacred elements are reflected in Griffiths’s work for this commission. Her installation encompasses ceramics, painting and poetry. The experiential quality of the work presents a sacred story, holding knowledge passed down from her old people.
Northern Territory
JOHNATHON WORLD PEACE BUSH, ARTIST
Pedro Wonaeamirri, mentor
Bringing the lessons and ways of Tiwi culture to a global audience is central to the work of Johnathon World Peace Bush (Jon Jon). He is mentored by Pedro Wonaeamirri and the pair are cousins – their shared ancestry and Country existing at the heart of this mentorship. Wonaeamirri has been exhibiting since 1989 and is a senior cultural leader on the Tiwi Islands with a significant and strong knowledge of the old Tiwi language and Tiwi culture. Jon Jon has painted a triptych that brings together stories of when his grandparents lived on Andranangoo Country (Goose Creek) with Western systems of laws. The subject and choice of materials and colours are vital expressions of Tiwi culture. He explains: ‘I make the work with ochres, from the ground, from the land’. Jon Jon and Wonaeamirri came together to produce a tunga (folded bark ceremonial basket) and a two-channel video work that offers insight into the strong culture of their practices. The video shows Jon Jon dancing his totem tartuwali (shark) with Wonaeamirri singing for Jon Jon on their shared Country.
South Australia
ALEC BAKER AND ERIC BARNEY, ARTISTS
Vincent Namatjira OAM, mentor
The strength of story and the practice of cultural protocol is central to Alec Baker and Eric Barney’s two collaborative paintings titled Ngura (Country). Barney is a younger artist who paints in the proper way under the cultural mentorship of Baker, a senior lawman, and both are mentored by Vincent Namatjira for this commission. This important way of working collaboratively is vital to the continuation of painting of Tjukurrpa (ancestral dreaming). Namatjira comments that through the exhibition the artists are ‘bringing their Country to the big smoke’. Namatjira started painting at Iwantja Arts in 2011, where he has established himself as a subversive and witty portraitist. In 2020 he was the first Indigenous artist to win the Archibald Prize.
Victoria
MITCH MAHONEY, ARTIST
Maree Clarke, mentor
Boon Wurrung and Barkindji man Mitch Mahoney has been working alongside his aunt and mentor, Mutti Mutti, Yorta Yorta and Boon Wurrung/Wemba Wemba woman Maree Clarke for the past five years. Clarke has been a practising artist living and working in Melbourne for the last three decades. Her continuing desire to affirm and reconnect with her cultural heritage has seen her revival of the traditional possum skin cloaks, together with the production of contemporary jewellery designs adorned with kangaroo teeth and echidna quills. Clarke considered My Country the right time for Mahoney to apply his strong skills to a major commission. Mahoney directed this opportunity towards Country, cultural revitalisation and working with materials to create two canoes that represent his father’s Country, as well as a possum skin cloak, which honours his mother’s Boon Wurrung culture, telling saltwater stories. Making a canoe is an extensive process and has many protocols. With further mentorship with Barkindji artist David Doyle, Mahoney has undertaken full and proper practice, from learning where to take a canoe to healing the tree with mud.
Edwina Green is NGV Curator, First Nations Art
Sophie Prince is NGV Curatorial Project Officer, Australian and First Nations Art
Country Road + NGV First Nations Commissions: My Country
My Country is supported by Principal Partner Country Road.