John Mawurndjul (born 1951) is a highly regarded Australian contemporary Indigenous artist. He uses traditional motifs in innovative ways to express spiritual and cultural values, He is especially known for his distinctive and innovative creations based on the traditional cross-hatching style of bark painting technique known as rarrk.

Life

Mawurndjul was born on 31 December 1951 in Mumeka, a traditional camping ground for members of the Kurulk clan, on the Mann River, about 50 kilometres (31 mi) south of Maningrida.^[1] He is a member of the Kuninjku people of West Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, and grew up with only occasional contact with non-indigenous people and culture.^[2] Born in the bush south of Maningrida, Mawurndjul has based his life on Kurulk clan lands that stretch between the Liverpool, Mann and Tomkinson Rivers. This tract of sparsely populated tropical woodland is some 500 kilometres east of Darwin and accessible by dirt road only during the dry season. Steeped in ancestral narratives and abundant in plant and animal life, the area features ancient rock art galleries that skirt the northern rim of the Arnhem Plateau.^[3] As of May 2010^[update] he was living a traditional lifestyle at an outstation near Maningrida, still painting and hunting.^[2]

Mawurndjul was introduced to ritual painting in 1969 by his father Anchor Kulunba (c. 1920 – 1996) who taught him crosshatching and rarrk techniques associated with the Mardayin ceremony to honour the region’s ancestral beings. In ensuing years under the instruction of his older brother Jimmy Njiminjuma (1947 – 2004), he became a proficient bark painter developing expertise unique to this form of practice: the harvesting and preparation of the stringybark support, cartographic knowledge of sacred ochre deposits and skills to grind, mix and fix their coloured pigments, and the fashioning of sedge rushes into delicate single-strand brushes.^[4] Under Njiminjuma’s watch, Mawurndjul was also introduced to long-established Kuninjku conventions dictating subject matter and its iconography, the characteristics of which have been explored at length by anthropologist Luke Taylor in his pioneering analysis of Western Arnhem Land art.^[3]

Art

Throughout his career Mawurndjul has focused on the rarrk form as a key element in his work. As a young man Mawurndjul produced hair-thin lines of crosshatching in his more figurative works. These grid structures and the occasional exposures of the under layers of paint create a bir'yin' ("brilliance," "shining," "shimmering") effect, a quality of reminiscent of wangarr marr, or ancestral power.^[5] Later he produced paintings of Ngalyod that showed its body with dazzling zigzags of colour. Some early works show detailed compositions with Ngalyod encircling other Djang and pulling them into the ground.^[6] While these paintings have a light-emitting effect, the designs are not as powerful as those of ceremonial paintings, and the power coming from rarrk bark paintings is a "manifestation" of ancestral powers.^[7] Mawurndjul's later work also includes circle shapes on top of the rarrk pattern, creating an visual effect that seems to make these circles "float" or even form figures with the grid that encapsulate more complex meanings.^[5] In his Madayin series, these circles are seen to be reminiscent of waterholes, which also contain ancestral powers.^[5] In Mawurndjul's words:

"Mardayin phenomena are located in water,

underneath bodies of water. Water is on the top and

Mardayin is underneath… it is always in the water."^[5]

He was tutored in rarrk, a traditional painting technique using fine cross-hatching and infill,^[8] in the 1970s by his uncle Peter Marralwanga^[9] and elder brother Jimmy Njiminjuma^[1] and began producing small paintings on bark. Some even considered him an "artistic prodigy" at the time.^[10] In 1979, Mawurndjul began painting for the market, in which much of his works were small bark paintings that depicted animals and spirits, including bambirl (echidna), ngaldadmurrng (saratoga fish), birlmu (large barramundi fish), mimih spirits, yawkyawk and Ngalyod (the Rainbow Serpent).^[11] Two examples of these early works are Ngaldadmurrng saratoga (1979) and Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent at Dilebang (c.1979).^[11] During the 1980s he began producing larger and more complex works, and in 1988 won a Rothmans Foundation Award.^[12] Some of his inspiration draws from Yirawala, Midjawmidjaw, Paddy Compass, and other artists.^[13]

Over Mawurndjul's career he has employed many different techniques, some from his culture and others he has created himself. In the beginning of his career Mawurndjul stuck to his roots through creating many images of important figures in Aboriginal art such as the rainbow serpent Ngalyod. In later years he has emphasized a "geometric aesthetic",^[14] using Mardayin ceremony body paintings in his works and making them his own.^[14] For instance, in Madayin Ceremony (2000), Mawurndjul uses trianglular shapes hidden in a rectangular grid near the top of the work, similar to a body painting from the Kakodbebuldi region.^[15] In fact, because the contemporary art world has started to consider his work as such, Mawurndjul clarified that this geometric experimentation was not in attempts to stray from traditional Madayin ceremonies, but to avoid using designs that would uncover their sacred and secret meanings in his works that are produced for the market.^[13] Using the term "contemporary" when it comes to both Aboriginal and Mawurndjul's work or focusing on its inspiration, the artist's individualism, innovation, or surface-level features of the works takes the art away from its ancestral roots.^[13] Another important thing to note about his work is that "he is a history painter, not a landscape painter."^[16]

While painting on bark has been Mawurndjul’s primary medium, the artist has also produced many figurative carvings and lorrkon (hollow log coffins), bringing them to life with his finely painted imagery, and he has forayed briefly into printmaking.^[3] All the materials for his art production, bark, ochres, and brushes can be sourced on his country as they are for ceremony.^[17]

Throughout the 90s, Mawurundjul's work was included in major exhibitions displaying Aboriginal Australian art, most notably, Dreamings in New York (1988), Crossroads in Japan (1992), Aratjara: Art of the first Australians in Germany and the UK (1993–1994), and In the heart of Arnhem Land in France (2001).^[1]

In 2000, Mawurndjul's work was amongst that of eight individual and collaborative groups of Indigenous Australian artists shown in the prestigious Nicholas Hall at the Hermitage Museum in Russia. The exhibition received a positive reception from Russian critics, one of whom wrote: "This is an exhibition of contemporary art, not in the sense that it was done recently, but in that it is cased in the mentality, technology and philosophy of radical art of the most recent times. No one, other than the Aborigines of Australia, has succeeded in exhibiting such art at the Hermitage.^[12]

Also in 2000, his work was featured at the Sydney Biennale.^[1]

In 2004, twenty-two of Mawurndjul's works were curated by Hetti Perkins in Crossing Country at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia in attempts to detach common perception of market engagements with contemporary Aboriginal art, as well the use of bark as a medium.^[18] Crossing Country looked at the history of western Arnhem Land's artists and how they communicated and inspired each other.^[18]

In 2006, the Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac (MQBJC) in Paris commissioned a work form Mawurndjul as part of the Australian Indigenous Art Commission of the MQBJC.^[18] Mawurndjul's Mardayin at Milmilngkan (2006) ceiling mural inhabits the MQBJC's gift shop, however, the museum fails to properly attribute the work to him, a testament to the modern world's struggle to recognise indigenous art.^[18]

His work was subsequently the subject of a major retrospective in Basel, Switzerland (2005) and in the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany (2006). In 2018–2019 an exhibition of his work was shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and afterwards as part of Tarnanthi 2018 at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The John Mawurndjul exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art showcases a collection of bark paintings from one of the leading custodians of the land in Australia. The exhibition highlights Mawurndjul's spiritual heritage, which is reflected in his art, and the paradox of bark painting as both an ancient and new form of artistic expression.^[19] The exhibition is arranged according to the moiety, the two ritual groups that divide a people, and the artist's request to not hang works in chronological order reflects the Indigenous sense of time. The exhibition showcases Mawurndjul's large-scale bark paintings, which he began making in the late 1980s after a dream and inspired by visits to art museums.^[19] This exhibition showcased places of special cultural significance called kunred, along with the sacred places, spirits, and various animals that are integral to his artwork, has been developed under the leadership of the artist himself, and is described in both Kuninjku and English.^[20] This was the first major exhibition of his work in Australia.^[21] This made Mawurndjul the first Australian artist to have recceived a retrospective at two foremost museums in Europe.^[10]

Legacy

Mawurndjul continues to live at Milmilngkan, his ancestral lands, where he participates in ceremonies and uses materials sourced from his country for both art and sustenance. Mawurndjul's art has been featured in numerous exhibitions across Australia, Europe, and the world, including the retrospective "rarrk" John Mawurndjul: Journey through Time in Northern Australia at the Tinguely Museum in Basel in 2005 and the major retrospective John Mawurndjul: I Am the Old and the New, organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2018.^[20][6] Mawurndjul's interactions with France were facilitated by Apolline Kohen, the French-speaking arts adviser at Maningrida Arts and Culture, who was able to lobby on his behalf for his commission mural to be included in the bookshop of the MQBJC.^[17] Mawurndjul's broader reputation as a contemporary artist may be recovered from the vast wealth of materials, and his works may be considered contemporary in the sense that he works within a local Kuninjku history of art, maintains an awareness of the techniques used by a succession of other bark painters, yet brings his own new ideas and skills to this creativity.^[17]

Mawurndjul is recognised as a contemporary artist in Australian, French, and global art circles. His reputation was built on his engagement with new projects, enthusiastic cultural expansiveness with researchers and curators, and his energy at painting.^[17]

Mawurndjul has been a major influence on contemporary Kuninjku artists, and he has tutored his wife, Kay Lindjuwanga and daughter Anna Wurrkidj, who are now accomplished painters. He has created a whole school of artists and led an Australian art movement.^[1] Mawurndjul also stores away Mardayin sacred objects painted with the ‘inside,' or secret, designs, which, should other artists wish to paint similar designs, they must come to him for his approval.^[7] His influence can also be seen through his many awards he was won throughout his career.

Recognition and awards

In 2003, Mawurndjul was awarded the prestigious Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria, recognizing his significant contributions to contemporary Indigenous art in Australia.^[22]

2003 also saw Mawurndjul named by Australian Art Collector magazine as one of the country's 50 most collectible artists.^[23] His works have been singled out for praise by many critics, including Art Gallery of New South Wales senior curator Hetti Perkins, and artist Danie Mellor.^[8]

In 2010, Mawurndjul became a Member of the Order of Australia. This was because of his work in preserving the Aboriginal culture and artistic style through his work.^[24]

Australia Council for the Arts

The Australia Council for the Arts is the arts funding and advisory body for the Government of Australia. Since 1993, it has awarded a Red Ochre Award. It is presented to an outstanding Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal Australian or Torres Strait Islander) artist for lifetime achievement.