PROVENANCE ISN’T ALWAYS A STRAIGHT LINE

by Mirri Leven

Recently, a number of artworks have found their way back through our doors, sometimes many years after I last saw them. Unwrapping these works again, remembering where they have been and the people who have lived with them, has had me reflecting on the life of an artwork and the many lives it becomes part of along the way.

I believe that we are never really the owners of an artwork. For a time, we simply have the privilege of living with it, caring for it and becoming part of its story.

An artwork has a life that extends far beyond any one person who might live with it. It carries the story given to it by the artist, but as it moves through the world it gathers its own history as well. It lives in different homes, hangs on different walls, witnesses families grow and change, is talked about over dinner tables, packed carefully into crates, moved across cities and countries, inherited, gifted, sold and loved again.

We become part of its story, rather than it becoming simply part of our property.

Each work carries Country, culture, history and stories that existed long before any of us encountered the painting and will continue long after it leaves our hands. The idea that we could ever truly “own” them has never felt quite right to me. For a time, we have the privilege of caring for them.

At the gallery, the time a work spends in our care can sometimes be relatively short, but it is incredibly intimate.

We spend so much time with every work that comes through our doors. Often it begins with choosing it from a long list, an email exchange or discovering it amongst a group of works at the art centre. Then it arrives and we carefully unwrap it, sometimes seeing it in the flesh for the very first time, and it begins to reveal itself.

It is catalogued and photographed. Research and its story and history is written about. We talk about it. Some work’s might be curated into an exhibition, hung prominently in the office, or make its way into our extensive stockroom.

I love our stockroom for this reason. It isn’t a place where paintings simply disappear. It is constantly being revisited. Clients come in every day looking for completely different things. Some know precisely what they want. Others have no idea and want to see almost everything. So the works come out again and again. We rediscover them. We talk about them. We put unexpected paintings beside one another and see something we hadn’t noticed before.

Eventually the artwork goes to live in a new home. Sometimes it stays there for decades. Sometimes it is gifted to someone else or handed down through generations of a family. Sometimes circumstances change and people move, collections evolve, homes are downsized and the work begins another journey.

Every now and then, that journey brings it back through our doors.

There is something incredibly special about unwrapping a painting that I last saw ten, fifteen or twenty years ago. You remember where it hung in the gallery, the exhibition it belonged to, the artist at that particular moment in their life, or which staff members hand writing the code number could belong to. But the painting has had an entire life since then that we haven’t been part of.

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Recently, a number of works have made that journey back to us, and each reunion has reminded me why this part of what we do means so much to me.

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The return of a work by Kitty Simon Napanangka is particularly personal for me.

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Kitty was a friend and remains one of my favourite artists. She was a Warlpiri woman living at Lajamanu, and in many ways she was the artist who accompanied me through my own career in First Nations art. I was fortunate to be involved with her work as she developed the extraordinary formative style for which she became known.

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Over the years I visited Kitty in Lajamanu, Katherine and Darwin, and she travelled to Sydney several times for exhibitions with us. She was funny, strong and completely individual, and so were her paintings.

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Kitty was a keeper of women’s Law, and much of her work relates to Mina Mina and women’s ceremony. What can initially appear to be pure abstraction is deeply descriptive: Country articulated through fields of colour, loose forms, dots and marks, recalling salt, water, desert flowers and ceremonial designs. She developed a visual language that was unmistakably her own.

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The work that has now returned to us was included in Kitty Napanangka Simon and the Ladies of Lajamanu, held at Cooee Art in Paddington from 6–28 March 2020. That exhibition was originally intended to be Kitty’s third solo exhibition with us. But life in Lajamanu had other plans. Kitty’s health, renal dialysis away from community and continual sorry business meant that she could not complete the body of work we had hoped for. Instead, the exhibition became something more expansive. Kitty’s paintings were shown alongside Myra Herbert Nungurrayi, Lily Hargraves Nungurrayi and Lorna Fencer Napurrula, generations of extraordinary Warlpiri women whose work demonstrated that no artist or story exists entirely in isolation.

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To now unwrap this painting again, years later, brings all of that flooding back. The last time I saw her was in Lajamanu when I was 7 months pregnant and her and her sister wife gave my unborn baby the name Jimijar her paternal grandfathers name. To say we were honoured is but an understatement.

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It feels fitting that another work to return is by Lorna Fencer Napurrula.

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Lorna was one of the great pioneering colourists of Lajamanu and the first I ever collected. She began painting in the mid-1980s and became renowned for the extraordinary force and freedom of her canvases. She was a generation before Kitty, and I see something of the permission created by artists such as Lorna in the extraordinary freedom that Kitty later claimed for herself.

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This painting, Bush Potato, 1996, relates to one of Lorna’s great subjects: the Yarla or Bush Potato Jukurrpa.

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Lorna’s mother’s Country was Yumurrpa, associated with the Big Bush Potato, while her father’s Country was Wapurtali, associated with the Little Bush Potato. The ancestral narrative tells of two brothers, the elder Big Yam and the younger Small Yam, whose quarrel escalates into an epic conflict, bringing death and destruction as the story travels across Country. It is a huge ancestral narrative attached to something that, in English, sounds wonderfully domestic: a big bush potato and a little bush potato.

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Lorna transformed these stories into paintings of extraordinary energy. Colour seems to push, collide and move across the canvas.

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Another Lajamanu pioneer to return to us is Abie Tjangala Jumbyinmba, a contemporary of Lorna Fencer and one of the remarkable senior men whose paintings helped define the early visual language that emerged from Lajamanu.

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This particular work, Water (Ngapa), 1997, already has an extraordinary life behind it.

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It was exhibited in Abie Jangala – Boss of the Water, Rain, Clouds and Thunder at Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery in April–May 1997, where it appeared as catalogue number 7.

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Years later it resurfaced in another important context, included in Up Close and Personal: Works from the Collection of Dr Peter Elliott AM at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney in August–September 2011. It was subsequently illustrated in Gavin Fry’s The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art, published by The Beagle Press in 2013, on page 32.

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And now it is here again.

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This has been an artist’s painting, an exhibition work, a gallery work, a collector’s work, part of an important collection, a published work and now, decades after we first handled it, we have the privilege of spending time with it once more.

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Then there is Kathleen Petyarre. Beginning with the batik movement of the late 1970s, Kathleen developed an extraordinarily refined painting practice centred particularly around her Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming and her Anmatyerre Country. Her paintings can seem almost impossibly delicate, thousands of marks creating shifting surfaces that feel simultaneously intimate and vast.

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Her career became nationally significant during the 1990s. She won the Telstra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 1999, and in 2001 the Museum of Contemporary Art presented a major retrospective of her work, reaffirming her importance within Australian contemporary art.

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For many years, this work hung proudly in the dining room of a much-loved Sydney home, with the harbour beyond it. I like thinking about how many people must have sat beneath and around that painting. Dinner parties, family gatherings, glasses of wine, arguments, celebrations and long conversations about the remarkable First Nations art collection that covered the walls on the apartment home.

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And on the walls of that same home was another painting that seems almost to come alive: a work by Johnny Tjangala Gordon Downs from Balgo Hills.

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I love imagining these two very different paintings sharing the same home for all those years. Kathleen’s extraordinary delicacy and movement alongside Johnny’s pulsing Balgo landscape, silently witnessing everything that happened around them.

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And now another chapter begins.

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That, for me, is one of the greatest privileges of working in this field for a long time.

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You begin to understand that the gallery is only one stop in a much longer journey.

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We meet these works. We care for them. We research them and photograph them. We learn their histories and tell their stories. We hang them on our walls and live alongside them. Eventually we introduce them to someone who falls in love with them and takes on the responsibility of them.

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But sometimes, many years later, you cut through the tape, fold back the wrapping and recognise an old friend.

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And for a little while, we have the privilege of caring for it once again.