Will Stubbs: In Conversation

IN THE WEEKS PRECEDING GURRUTU: THE ART OF MULKUN WIRRPANDA JULIUS KILLERBY INTERVIEWED WILL STUBBS. AS COORDINATOR OF THE BUKU-LARRNGGAY MULKA ART CENTRE, STUBBS KNEW WIRRPANDA AND HER WORK WELL.

THE CONVERSATION WAS AN OPPORTUNITY TO DISCUSS THE ARTIST’S CONCEPTUAL CONCERNS & HER LEGACY AS AN ARTIST AND AS A SENIOR MEMBER OF HER COMMUNITY.

WILL STUBBS has been the coordinator of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre at Yirrkala in the Northern Territory for almost 30 years. Through his work at the Art Centre, Stubbs has spent a lifetime passionately advocating Indigenous Arts and Australia's Aboriginal art centres. Prior to his time at Yirrkala, he worked as a criminal defence advocate in Sydney and the Top End for ten years. Following his move to Yirrkala, he worked for Aboriginal legal aid in the early 1990s. It was during this time that Stubbs met and married the Yolnu scholar, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr and began working at the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre. Stubbs is conversant in Yolnu language and, through his role at the Art Centre and in Yirrkala generally, has been party to their secret customs. In 2015 he was awarded the Australia Council Visual Arts Award for Advocacy. Since his appointment as Coordinator of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala artists have won 30 major art prizes and exhibited in landmark international exhibitions, including at the Musee du Quai Branly.

JULIUS KILLERBY is an artist and the Manager of JGM Gallery. He has more than 7 years of experience working within the Art Industry, including his selection as an assistant for the Australian Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. He has previously held positions at Metro Gallery, Scott Livesey Gallery and Flinders Lane Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. He has also worked alongside The Torch an organisation dedicated to the promotion of artworks by incarcerated or ex-incarcerated First Nations Australians. Within the context of his own practice, he has exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Art Gallery of Ballarat & Geelong Gallery. Killerby completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2017 and was an Archibald finalist in the same year, the youngest person to achieve this distinction.

KILLERBY What separates Mulkun Wirrpanda’s conceptual concerns from those of her contemporaries?

WILLIAM STUBBS In the period where she began working on the Harvest series, Ms. Wirrpanda took a novel approach to the topic and the angle. In the Yolnu community people generally paint in line with their identity and they generally refer to sacred designs that encapsulate that identity. Mulkun had a different approach. She was motivated by a desire to educate and entice people into renewing their knowledge and consumption of natural foods that were available - foodstuff. Because the entirety of reality is contained within a matrix of Yolnu cosmology and each element of that reality has a sacred essence assigned to it, she did not have the right to paint all of the various foodstuffs that she was interested in. In order to bypass those conventions she found a way to paint the plants she was referring to without employing their sacred clan design. So in that regard, she had a very novel conceptual framework with which she approached her painting in the period when she was working on the Harvest series and beyond.

JK What was Mulkun’s position within the Yolnu community?

WS Ms. Wirrpanda was a very senior elder. She was held in great regard within the community because of her knowledge and because of her active involvement in every aspect of community life. She attended every ceremony which she was physically able to go to, and these ceremonies run for weeks or months at a time and are almost always ongoing in some part of Yolnu land. She attended and directed, managed and choreographed many aspects of those ceremonies. She had a large family which she provided for, and she was a wise and active person who was held in very high regard by her community.

JK How does Mulkun’s aesthetic differ from those of her contemporaries?

WS I have to reiterate that her aesthetic was novel in comparison to her contemporaries, necessarily, because she wasn't allowed to employ sacred design in depicting the wide range of plants and foodstuffs that she wanted to educate people about. Because each one of them would belong to a different clan and would have a specific clan design relating to its identity, she would not have had the authority to paint in many of those areas which have their own autonomous systems of authority. Accordingly, she divined, or sensed the essence of the plant or animals she was depicting and created a design that she felt reflected the natural essence of that plant, independent of the sacred cosmology of Yolnu. In that case, her aesthetic was different from that of her contemporaries.

JK Perhaps to contextualise her work a bit, could you describe Mulkun’s personality?

WS She was clever, she was funny, she was loud. She was strong, tough and she was fearless. But she was warm and soft at the same time. So as you would expect a matriarch to be. She was a genuine leader of the first degree of her clan and her society, and she was able to sustain and buttress that with the fierce power of her intelligence and her curiosity, which allowed her to accumulate so much knowledge over her lifetime.

JK Mulkun was alive throughout the latter half of the ‘Stolen Generation’ and her father, Dhakiyarr, was, it seems, murdered by a group of Australian policemen. Do these traumas make her sharing of knowledge all the more remarkable and generous?

WS All Yolnu who have lived through the 20th and the first part of the 21st century have suffered extreme trauma. The traumas are ongoing as a result of the effects of colonialism and the suppression of their culture and the wilful blindness to the beauty and majesty of their culture. In Mulkun’s case, as in the case of most Yolnu, that trauma is somehow subsumed within a culture that lives in the moment, finds joy in everyday life, and appears in many cases to be unburdened by all of this historical and ongoing trauma.

JK Was there a reconciliatory undertone to her life and work?

WS I don't think she saw herself in a framework of reconciliation between Yolnu and non Yolnu. As with most Yolnu, they are slow to judgment. It's not an inherent part of their cultural background to judge everyone and everything, and particularly not by appearance. She was pretty similar, in that respect, to most Yolnu. They take people as they find them without the inherent concept of a hierarchy or supremacy that Europeans seem to labor with.

JK Just how ancient is the knowledge conveyed in Mulkun’s work?

WS In some of her work relating to the identity of her Dhudi-Djapu clan land, she references landscapes and landmarks that are quite possibly the result of the tsunami or the inundation of the Gulf of Carpentaria, which is likely to have occurred before the last ice age. So the question is unanswerable. But I'm pretty satisfied that we're looking at many, many millennia of knowledge contained in the songs, which eventually reflect in her work.

JK Could you describe what “gurrutu” is and how it relates to Mulkun’s work?

WS “Gurrutu” is not capable of being explained in a short answer, but it is an all encompassing, infinitely repeating framework that allows every element of reality, every person, every place, every animal, plant, bird, fish species and the land itself to trace a direct family relationship between itself and any other element within reality. So, it's an overarching matrix that is the main framework which holds human philosophy and society. And it's far too complex to try and understand or explain here. A mistranslation would be kinship, but because our concept of kinship is such a stunted one, it doesn't allow for the fact that we're all actually related to each other and in fact, to all oxygen based life forms. The current system allows you to trace exactly what that family relationship is and give meaning, identity and connection to all things within reality.

JK Could you describe the landscapes Mulkun travelled through and the subjects she depicted in her work?

WS The landscapes that Mulkun travelled within in Northeast Arnhem Land are untouched, fully functioning ecosystems that consists of saltwater, country, beaches and reefs, leading to rivers, which lead to estuaries, which lead to freshwater systems. The plants are in different zones. The bulk of Northeast Arnhem Land is a massive forest of eucalypt, and within that are pockets of mangroves, pockets of monsoonal rainforest and some open grasslands. Some of the shellfish and plants that Mulkun depicted can be found within those various landscapes.

JK What I find remarkable about Mulkun’s work is how she utilized the strengths of abstraction and representation so seamlessly. These images are records of botanical life (ostensibly a rather straightforward subject), but the degree to which they have been stylized imbues them with an intensity that conveys so much more than the subject alone. Would you agree with that?

WS Yes, I would agree with that.

JK In the catalogue text for Midawarr | Harvest you write that the phrase ‘Aborigines ate this’ is often included in the descriptions of plants in botanical text books. You discuss the way in which the tense of this phrase almost pre-supposes the conclusion of Aboriginal culture and is, in your words, “… the assumed tense for Aboriginal occupation.” How does Mulkun’s conception of Yolnu botanical life differ from the attitude of most botanical text books?

WS White supremacist textbook writers prefer to consign Indigenous people to the dustbin of history, but the reality is that that is not accurate. Yolnu people still live off the land with their full knowledge of their history and with full sovereignty.

JK The last artwork Mulkun ever made, Untitled II, will feature in this exhibition. It strikes me as aesthetically quite distinct from the rest of the works. What is this piece about?

WS It's quite a sad artwork in the sense that there's a person who's been really grossly impaired by the medical issues she was facing. She'd probably suffered multiple strokes at that stage, but her passion and her skill to create was still there. And it's almost a miracle that she could create these works, given how impaired she was. She was happy, she was cheerful. She wanted to come to the Centre even though her capacity to create was impaired, but she continued to create. And this is what came out of it –just a very poignant and beautiful work.

JK “Food security” is a term you bring up in the catalogue text for Midawarr | Harvest, and this term is, especially in recent years, more relevant than ever. The United Nations released a report in October 2022 saying that “A staggering three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet; the war in Ukraine has triggered surging food, fertilizer, and energy prices.” Do these food crises make Mulkun’s work, and the knowledge held within it, more relevant than ever?

WS Food crises are definitely going to be more prevalent for the industrial people who have been sheltered from it up to this point. Obviously, many people throughout the world have been in an ongoing food crisis, but with the prospect of climate change and war mongering, the occupants of cities may have their access to food more jeopardized than they’re used to.

JK How would you describe the legacy of Mulkun Wirrpanda? What was her impact and how will she be remembered by those who knew her and her work?

WS I feel that Ms. Wirrpanda’s legacy is probably yet to be fully appreciated. As we suffer the loss of ecosystems, which is probably inevitable in the current progression of climate change, and as we lose Indigenous knowledge from all over the world, not just from Australian First Nations People, what she was able to create and capture will be valued even more highly, I would anticipate.

- Will Stubbs

2020

Earth pigment on paper

2020

Earth pigment on paper

“The exhibition culminates in the last artwork Wirrpanda ever made, 'Untitled II', a series of drawn variations of a void. In the context of Wirrpanda's life and work, the space depicted is imbued with a sense of ancestral communication, rather than morbid contemplation.”

- Julius Killerby

2018

'Larrakitj', hollowed out tree

242cm x 22cm

2019

'Larrakitj', hollowed out tree

256cm x 15cm

2020

Earth pigment on paper

2020

Earth pigment on paper

2020

Earth pigment on paper

2019

Earth pigment on paper

2019

Work on paper

2019

Work on paper

2019

2017

2017

2017

Artist Biography

Mulkun Wirrpanda

Born in 1942, died in 2021, Dhuruputjpi, Eastern Arnhem Land, Australia.

MULKUN WIRRPANDA was a senior artist of the Dhudi-Djapu clan from Dhuruputjpi, in Eastern Arnhem Land, and was a classificatory daughter of the late Dhäkiyarr Wirrpanda and mother (by kinship) to senior artist and clan leader Djambawa Marawili. Wirrpanda painted Dhudi-Djapu miny’ji (sacred designs) that depicted her land at Dhuruputjpi, including the areas of Yalata and Darrangi. As the eldest and most knowledgeable of her clan, she was acknowledged as a leader, one of the few Yolnu women to have this status. Wirrpanda was an early practitioner of works without figurative imagery within the miny’tji (sacred clan design) –until recently restricted to ceremonial use – using natural earth pigments (ochres). She painted on bark, Larrakitj (memorial poles), Yidaki (didgeridoo) and was a talented carver, weaver and print maker.

From 2012 she began to explore lesser-known edible plant species, the nutritious food that she grew up on, which she feared were being forgotten by younger generations. In stark contrast to today, in those days old people lived for a long time without illness. This exploration coincided with landscape painter John Wolseley’s interest in returning to Yilpara, after the two artists had met during the Djalkiri project of 2010, when they spent an extended period exploring the botany of Blue Mud Bay. Wolseley spent a week at Yilpara with Wirrpanda in May 2012 and again at Yirrkala in June 2013, with further extended annual visits every year until her death in 2021. Their exhibition, Mulkun Wirrpanda & John Wolseley: Two old artists looking for food, presaged their collaboration, Midawarr/Harvest a joint exhibition at The National Museum of Australia in October 2017 that toured in Darwin and Melbourne. Her subsequent paintings of Maypal (shellfish), which inhabit the coastal waters of the Northern Territory culminated in an exhibition at Salon Art Projects in Darwin.

In 2019, Wolseley and Wirrpanda explored extended ideas of Maypal, which included larvae that bore into wood. This led into her final, significant project on the theme of termite ecosystems, which forms the focus of her work in The National 2021 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Using natural pigments on bark, board and Larrakitj, she has depicted the mounds of munyukulunu, magnetic or compass termites (Amitermes meridionalis), a species of eusocial insect that is endemic to Northern Australia. The common name derives from the fact that the wedge-shaped mound is aligned with its main axis running north and south.

Capturing empirical observational Yolnu knowledge, Wirrpanda painted these idiosyncratic termite mounds inhabited not by their makers, but by their symbiotic partners: nadi or northern meat ants (Iridomyrmex sanguineus), diverse bird species (principally pardalotes) and their eggs, as well as beehives. These termites, carnivorous ants, birds and bees are able to live in social balance. As Rachel Kent noted of the works: “They’re incredibly beautiful but what they show is this model for adaptive social living and the sharing of space in a harmonious and collaborative way and I think it is a fantastic metaphor for ways we might think about our future.”

Each one of Wirrpanda projects led on from the other naturally, creating a unique body of work that showcases the artist’s passion for revitalising, maintaining and sharing Yolnu cultural knowledge.