In its 60th anniversary year, the Australian Design Centre is proud to present Current: Gail Mabo, Lisa Waup, Dominic White from 2 August to 25 September 2024, showing new and recent work by three powerful and acclaimed First Nations artists.
Gail Mabo (Meriam), Lisa Waup (Gunditjmara/Torres Strait Islands) and Dominic White (Palawa/Trawlwoolway) are known for their practices that affirm and continue perpetual connection to their lands, waters and ancestors.
Current highlights and connects each artist’s vital and contemporary multi-disciplinary practices while referencing the passages of water moving along Australia’s eastern coast, between the land and people of Zenadh Kes/Torres Strait in the far north to lutruwita/Tasmania in the south.
Gail Mabo’s multisensory installation, Ma’rap Sau, combines sculpture and video, building on her work involving bamboo tagai or star maps and architectural recreations of her childhood home.
This immersive environment evokes Mabo’s ancestral connections to Mer (Murray Island) as a locus of cultural memory, with particular reference to her father Eddie ‘Koiki’ Mabo’s activism, which led to a landmark legal case enshrining native title land rights for Australian First Nations people. Here Mabo further explores the medium of bamboo, native to Mer, that her father planted at James Cook University as a young man.
“For me ‘current’ is the calling of the wind,” says Mabo. “So when the wind blows through the bamboo we hear the voices of our forebears who still guide us and protect us, giving us a sense of knowing where we come from and how we need to look after and maintain a connection to that place.”
Lisa Waup’s major installation holding Country was commissioned for Current and acquired by the University of Melbourne in 2023. Waup is also showing sculptures and major works on paper, reflecting the breadth and depth of her practice. These works articulate her inalienable connection to her cultural and ancestral traditions.
“I am extremely proud of the holding Country series which has been a long time in the making,” says Waup. “The reflective ink on the bags illuminates when you shine light on them, and the process offers a reciprocal gaze – you can see them, and they can see you. Conceptually, this industrial material becomes a way of reflecting on the historical and ongoing injustices imposed on First Nations people since colonial invasion.”
Dominic White’s works explore the formal and conceptual properties of different vessels such as the Coolamon. “A Coolamon is a place where you raise your family, for carrying the things you need with you. It’s an open vessel, things flow through it, not just remaining in it,” he says.
House Nailed Country Coolamon is covered with tiny bronze Monopoly houses mounted on nails. White says of the work: “Our landscape is smothered with houses, so we can’t use it anymore. We’re tied up with a sense of law that doesn’t support a much larger landscape.”
Using techniques ranging from blacksmithing to manipulating found natural materials such as kelp, White has also created new works based on the slave collars of the colonial frontier and the professional western suit tie.
Across this project, making and selecting work for Current, White has explored his ancestral connections in the Palawa community, wrestling with the brutal histories of violence, slavery and dispossession in south-eastern Australia.
“It is a great privilege to present this exhibition as part of its national tour. The works of each individual artist are so strong and personal, and together they draw out and emphasise so many themes and connections – honouring the people and culture who have been here since the beginning, while calling out ongoing contemporary issues for First Nations people in Australia,” said Australian Design Centre CEO and Artistic Director, Lisa Cahill.
Current: Gail Mabo, Lisa Waup, Dominic White
Australian Design Centre, 101-115 William Street, Darlinghurst
Exhibition: 2 August – 25 September 2024
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.australiandesigncentre.com for details.
Image: Lisa Waup, holding Country, 2023 (installation view), screen-painted hessian bags, reflective ink, ochre, ink, found materials, 299 x 720 x 340 cm variable. The University of Melbourne Art Collection – photo by Christian Capurro