on the Tropic of Capricorn:
Walala Tjapaltjarri & Campfire Group
Sculptures from the Tingari Cycle
Fire-Works Gallery, 2001

In the late 80s, a friend and I travelled to Central Australia. My friend was teaching in a school about an hour outside of Dubbo in Western New South Wales. I caught a bus from Brisbane to Dubbo and from there, after we piled our suitcases into the back of her four cylinder hatchback, we started driving. It was a quiet time, driving through Western New South Wales, into South Australia and along the Stuart Highway to Alice Springs and Uluru where we camped at Yulara. Until then, the desert was an imaginary place to me, somehow distant and elusive. As the navigator, I translated maps to land.

This trip stays with me, in my memory and my heart. I had crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, wandered in the desert of this country and was lost to it. To my unknowing eyes, it was incomprehensible, a strange landscape. Mine was a brief encounter, just a tourist passing through. As I walked and stopped, my footprints were dispersed by hot winds, vanished. I stood, surrounded by low lying, pale green scrub on the red, burning-orange-red, land, salt lakes stretched ahead, rocks and hills which pushed up to a sky which was impossibly blue. This desert is a place.

In telling and reading the land, descriptions and perspectives shift. Landscapes prevail in Australian art and through them, artists reveal not only the land but also their cultures and themselves. In many cultural mythologies the desert signifies both desolation as well as a place for quiet contemplation and divine revelation. It's not often the desert is called 'home'. For Walala Tjapaltjarri, the desert is the ancestoral and sacred country of the Pintupi people. Land and culture are inextricably connected, in dialogue with and informing each other, as representation and as reality. Through his work, Walala presents his cultural relationship with the desert.

In October 1984, aged in his mid-twenties, Walala arrived with his family at Kiwirrkura after walking out of the Gibson Desert. Prior to this, he had lived the traditional lifestyle of the Pintupi, near Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay), to the west of Alice Springs in Western Australia. He commenced painting two years later and by 1996, his painting style changed from a Papunya Tula style to the works he continues to paint, characterised by outlined rectangular shapes with surrounding dots and a palette of up to four colours. In the catalogue, Art and Land, exhibition curator, Kevin Wilson writes, "the paintings ... from the Central and Western Desert region, are often more like abstract maps rather than the spiritual maps they are in the eyes of the Aboriginal people."1

Seemingly topographical, these works depict real and mythological sites and natural formations such as water soakages, salt lakes, rockholes, sandhills and rock outcrops in the Gibson Desert. They refer to the 'Tingari Cycle' which is a series of sacred and secret mythological songs associated with the Artist's Dreaming and available only to initiated men. According to Walala, during the Dreaming, Tingari ancestors gathered at a series of sites for Malliera (Initiation) Ceremonies. They travelled vast stretches of country, performing rituals at specific sites which in turn created the diverse natural features of the environment. The Tingari men were accompanied by novices and usually followed by Tingari women. The Tingari creation stories and rituals are venerated in the song cycles and ceremonies of today, forming part of the teachings of the post-initiatory youths as well as providing explanations for contemporary customs.

Recently, Walala collaborated with the Campfire Group to produce a series of steel sculptures, manufactured as editions. Comprised of Indigenous and non-Indigenous members, Campfire is an artist collective which initiates projects based on cultural exchange and collaboration. Fire-Works Gallery provides a focal point for exhibitions, education, residencies, workshops and other projects. In June 2000, Fire-Works Gallery Director, Michael Eather visited Alice Springs to work with Walala in his studio at Gallery Gondwana. Ink-on-paper works featuring the rectangular shapes like those in Walala's paintings were produced. For Michael, "the graphic confidence of Walala's geometrical groupings on canvas made a fascinating translation to paper and ink. His marks in this medium displayed a calligraphic quality, unseen in his paintings."

The Campfire team for this project was Laurie Nilsen, Elton Cole and Michael. They mapped the drawings to a three dimensional, computer drafting programme. Exact rings, which would become the physical manifestation of the ink-marks, were measured and numbered. Subsequently, the rings were cut from 20mm steel with the innards (or dumps) used to make bases for the sculptures. The steel rings were assembled, reproducing the original drawings in 3D. However, according to Laurie, the difference between sculpture and drawing is not readily apparent: "a drawing is still a drawing whether it's paper, metal or sand."

What occurs in these works is a transformation in both media and representation: processes of collaboration and exchange imbue the work with altered aesthetic sensibilities. Reflecting on the process, Elton commented, "It's a different sort of ownership and most definitely a different definition or understanding of what art means ... This is really a contemporary form for ancient sacred and secret stories."

These sculptural pieces, produced collaboratively by Walala and Campfire, are stark and striking. They are a different type of map. As three dimensional works, they are totemic. The composed, rectangular rings act like frames through which to read the landscape.

NOTES
1. Kevin Wilson, 'Re-Learning to see', Art and Land: Contemporary Australian Vision, curated by Kevin Wilson, Catalogue, Asialink Centre + Noosa Regional Gallery, Melbourne, March 2000, p 8