What is the meaning of ceremony? For a First Nations artist, the word is both loaded and simple - an elegant summing up of the Indigenous experience as both ancient and contemporary, rooted in ancestry and a continuing process.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
For Hetti Perkins, "ceremony" is the most potent paradigm through which to view the work of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait artists working today.
And as curator of the National Gallery of Australia's fourth National Indigenous Art Triennial, it's the concept that threads through the works she has commissioned from 35 artists across south-eastern Australia.
Visitors to the show, which opens on March 26, will experience scented mist, etched bones, delicate vessels and scarred trees - just a sample of the various takes on the central theme.
"I think many people thinking of 'ceremony' might have a fairly narrow view of what that means. And certainly, it is a term that has numerous ways of understanding it," she says.
Perkins is speaking a week ahead of the exhibition opening - a week that has been so long coming, and has been postponed and rescheduled so many times, that it's almost impossible to believe it will now actually happen.
But invitations are out and works are being installed; the suspense, frustration and uncertainty of the past two years will shortly give way to a different kind of anticipation.
Many of the artists involved have produced intimate and personal works, while others have been part of collaborative creations.
Ngambri artist Paul House will scar a tree without harming it, while Anangu artist Robert Fielding will explore the concept of an abandoned car strategically positioned on Ngambri land, in reference to the creation of Lake Burley Griffin in 1963. Cars are potent symbols in Indigenous communities - the people they have carried, the journeys they have taken.
For Wiradjuri artist S.J. Norman, there's an interesting interaction between "big-'C' ceremony and small-'c' ceremony"; his work involves the etched bones of sheep and cattle - "totemic colonial beasts".
Either way, the thought of all the works finally coming together in the latest iteration of the gallery's signature event is a mighty achievement.
An accomplished curator who has worked on exhibits at the Venice Biennale and the Musee du Quai Branley in Paris, Perkins is the daughter of legendary civil rights activist Charles Perkins, and sister to film and television director/producer Rachel Perkins. And in seeking to place a new stamp on the triennal's fourth iteration, she has chosen to commission artists practising mainly in Australia's south-east.
Many are also relatively unknown, at least to gallery audiences more accustomed to works and styles from Central Australia, the Kimberley and the Torres Strait.
"These artists from the south-east are very strongly connected to their cultural inheritance as well," she says.
"If you sort of go into cliche, judging a book by its cover, it doesn't matter what the cover of the book is, in this instance, the content is the same - this very strong connection to country and to community and to the culture of their people. And this is often expressed in ways that are very personal, very individual.
"I think that's also something that is very much part of - more broadly speaking - what we can call Aboriginal culture in Australia ... it's a sum of many, many, many individual parts over millennia."
And by choosing lesser-known artists from a variety of disciplines, including visual art, film, music and dance, Perkins has widened the parameters of the show's concept - "what might be understood as the sort of plurality of artistic practices that come into a ceremonial space".
And not just within a space, but outside it as well; the NGA is located in Canberra, a place that holds a strong and dark symbolism for many Indigenous Australians.
"One of the things that I had in mind in developing this idea around ceremony was also that it's the 50th anniversary of the Tent Embassy, and the National Gallery being so close to that site is something that is of course, very present in all of our minds," she says.
The fact that the exhibition, in its final form, is now opening so close to the anniversary just two months ago on January 26, is both serendipitous and auspicious.
"I was thinking about demonstrations, about what the Tent Embassy means, and my life and many of my colleagues and the artists have grown up participating in demonstrations and protests and so on, and how I see those as a form of ceremony as well.
"It's people coming together with a common cause, which is to create a better something for the common good, to make things better for our people. It's an organised action, and it's also quite a choreographed action. So I really wanted to bring this idea of works that are activist, that might be active, or that activate people. So that's another strand, I guess, in the fabric of what ceremony might mean."
Canberra artist Paul Girrawah House, along with his mother, the eminent elder Matilda House, will be marking a tree in the gallery's Sculpture Garden on the show's opening weekend. It's part of an extended project of healing, and House has already "scarred" or marked several trees in a process he hopes will eventually encompass the entire Parliamentary Triangle.
It's a way of acknowledging his ancestors, and a cultural practice distinctive to south-eastern Aboriginal communities.
"What I do, with authority from mum and our elders, is to carve markings on trees to acknowledge and respect and honour the old people," he says.
"But also it's about reclaiming the return, renewal and revival of connection to country. What we do is contemporary, but it's based on traditional practices in the past, but in contemporary times. We do things slightly differently, but with as much respect to the old ways, the old people, as possible."
Born in Canberra - in the old Canberra Hospital, no less - House is constantly aware of dark or violent undercurrents of dispossession and darkness, especially within Canberra's Parliamentary Triangle.
The National Gallery sits squarely within this space; so does Old Parliament House, and the bigger house up on the hill - the one in which so many formative decisions are made.
And in marking trees - the trees, he says, choose him, rather than the other way around - he is trying to find a way to reconcile and heal from what has gone on in the past.
"The trees are important to us, here on country and our way of life. Trees represent our old people, they're our relatives, they must be respected and protected," he says.
"Trees help keep the peace. Trees speak the language of the birds and of the people that use the trees and the animals. Through my work, hopefully the trees help us achieve justice - for our old people and for our young people.
"Trees look, listen and understand."
It's a powerful notion; a tree - young or old, native or exotic - can bear witness to so much. But in continuing the cultural practice of scarring, and creating a permanent installation in the Sculpture Garden in the process, House is showing how his relationship to country has endured.
He's not the only artist with his sights on the Parliamentary Triangle. Another work in the show, Blak Parliament, has been created by a group of 16 artists from the Yarrenyty Arltere and Tangentyere art centres in Alice Springs.
"It's their version of Parliament House, an installation, and it's a wonderful, incredible work," Perkins says.
"And that started with this idea that Canberra for many people is quite a remote and distant place, where people that they don't know and have never met make decisions that impact their lives, often in ways that they haven't been consulted on and haven't agreed to.
"So it's really interesting to bring for the artists to respond to this idea of ceremony, but particularly within the context of Canberra being the sort of political heartland of white government."
Wiradjuri artist Nicole Foreshew is also preoccupied with healing, but her works come from a more personal place.
From 2017 to 2020, she collaborated with the late Gija artist Booljoonngali, in works that were "really about exploring the concept of the body and the earth and song and through the power of objects and art just being created by two people from two very different places in the country," she says.
Her Ceremony works are delicate clay vessels and portraits of Booljoongali's hands imbued with ochre, alongside a suite of the late artist's paintings.
Another of her works, an installation of mist scented with natural bush herbs, is also a form of healing. She says it's characteristic of the exhibition's larger message.
"It's by artists that are quite quiet in their making, but their works are quite powerful at this point in time that people will see them," she says.
"I think they raise many questions, the artists and their work, about what is it, why do you make it, what's the relationship that we all have together?
"But I think the answers to all these questions will really be written in the work, it will be shared in their concepts, it will underpin everything that people experience, and it really is the theoretical structure of our world.
"It's our voice that will remind us as artists, but also our audience, about the ongoing resilience, spirituality and reclamation of country and land at this really important time"
- The Fourth National Indigenous Art Triennial opens at the National Gallery of Australia on March 26 and runs to July 31. Visit nga.gov.au for details.
Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:
- Bookmark canberratimes.com.au
- Download our app
- Make sure you are signed up for our breaking and regular headlines newsletters
- Follow us on Twitter
- Follow us on Instagram