The women of Maningrida and surrounding homelands use a combination of locally found seeds, bone and shells to make a variety of jewellery including necklaces. earrings and bracelets. Many of the artists use complex patterns and designs to make their beautiful creations.
A ‘bamagora’ is a Burarra word for a traditional woven tent-like structure. A bamagora was woven to create a shelter for a child or adult when sleeping.
The women of Maningrida and surrounding homelands use a combination of locally found seeds, bone and shells to make a variety of jewellery including necklaces. earrings and bracelets. Many of the artists use complex patterns and designs to make their beautiful creations.
The women of Maningrida and surrounding homelands use a combination of locally found seeds, bone and shells to make a variety of jewellery including necklaces. earrings and bracelets. Many of the artists use complex patterns and designs to make their beautiful creations.
This painting depicts a sacred site at ‘Kurrurldul’, an outstation south of Maningrida.
The ‘rarrk’, or abstract crosshatching, on this work represents the design for the crow totem ancestor called ‘Djimarr’. Today this being exists in the form of a rock, which is permanently submerged at the bottom of Kurrurldul Creek. The ‘Djimarr’ rock in the stream at Kurrurldul is said to move around and call out in a soft hooting tone at night. Both the stone itself and the area around it are considered sacred.
The imagery represents the rock mentioned above at the bottom of Kurrurldul creek, which is the final transmutation of the dreaming ancestor ‘Djimarr’. Finally, the pattern used here is also the crow design used in the sacred ‘Mardayin’ ceremony, which is a large regional patri-moiety ceremony now rarely conducted in central and eastern Arnhem Land.
This design depicts Buluwana with dilly bag on her back holding yam and digging stick. “She’s an old lady from ancestor creation time, before mimi. Her skin name Wamutjan – she is from the Dhuwa moiety. When the mimi came, she turned to stone in stone country out Yikarrakkal and Manmoyi way. But we can’t tell all about Buluwana more further, because it’s a secret. Only my people can know and only djunkai (caretaker) can tell full Buluwana story. But we can draw her. I draw her because she my dreaming. She lives in sacred place, where she turned to stone and lives there now forever.”
This design is depicts Bawaliba, Spirit woman. “This is the Dreaming of my mother and my uncles. These spirits are called Bawáliba. A long time ago they used to go out hunting. That’s in Ranger station near the airport (mum and uncle from further this way to Jingarr). Their homeland. They used to go out hunting with dilly bags and digging sticks. They used to collect a lot of bush foods, and sleep together with one bark shelter. Sometimes they come alive when we sleep, they come in the house when we sleep and peep through the window and we looked them with white clay (gapan) and red cloth tied around. We get up to look but they have disappeared. They are really tall. They are like human beings, like us. They dance and have a lot of hair. They are carrying fish traps and digging sticks. They are good spirits, they protect us and they recognise families. They might knock on the window to remind us they are there looking out for us. You can hear them whisper, sometimes they talk about us and might say, ‘why are they making a house here?’ Then they say to each other, ‘This family are from here, its ok, they are sleeping here for the night’. During the day they turn into stone and they sleep. When you see that green rock, that’s Bawáliba.”
This design is a salt water story, depicting sea life mainly from Rocky Point and also Nardilmuk homelands. The etching features the diverse salt water life from the country in Central Arnhemland, including dugong, shark, prawn, fish, sea-snake, and lobster. “We always go fishing and get these fish and animals and cook them on the fire for eating together. We can only see them dugong at night time, that’s when we hunt them. We get that line and go fishing down at the rocks and get them shark and stingray. Some fish we can catch with a net or spear and some we catch out deep blue sea in that boat. In this design the animals are alive underwater, that’s why it is blue all over.”
The women of Maningrida and surrounding homelands use a combination of locally found seeds, bone and shells to make a variety of jewellery including necklaces. earrings and bracelets. Many of the artists use complex patterns and designs to make their beautiful creations.
The mimih spirit exists in a realm that runs parallel to and mirrors many facets of human life, also demonstrating the deep sense of time and place understood by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Such spirits feature importantly in relation to Aboriginal spirituality, cosmology, social and moral tales as well as ritual. As is true with the multiple mediums employed by artists of West Arnhem Land, the development of artistic style and form is in line with an awareness by the artist that the work produced is predominantly made for a broader audience. Whether show in a national or international context these works communicate and exist in a particular space that is cross-cultural and simultaneously so particular to the Arnhem region.
The mimih sits within a complex and important pedagogical and religious body of knowledge which links Kuninjku people to their distinctive escarpment homelands. Young Kuninjku artists, or apprentices, employ the mimih as an important exercise for the practice of the rarrk technique, as it could be achieved on a smaller surface area before, being attempted in larger scale, on pieces of bark. The mimih serves a purpose for those young artists first learning to carve in a social space of sharing and innovating. The initial mimih manifestation was a large form that almost mirrored the anatomy of a human and at this stage the sculptures have been likened to morkuy carvings visible in eastern Arnhem Land. Contemporaneously, mimih are depicted in a refined, slender, even emaciated form with a broad range of facial expressions giving both individual character to, and denoting the potential volatility and humour that mimih spirits are notable for in their interaction with bininj (humans). The sculptures are frequently carved from the thin trunks of softwoods such as kapok (bombax ceiba or cottonwood) kurrajong, beach hibiscus or leichardt and are painted with earth pigments for their colouring and design.
A leading figure engaging the spirit in visual storytelling was Crusoe Kuningbal, a Kuninjku man, who while traveling was familiarised with carving styles from the east of Arnhem at the mission in Milingimbi pre-dating World War II. This showing a notable connection and interaction of different language groups across such space. As well as travel and the development of art forms being informed by cross cultural dialogues within northern Aboriginal language groups. The mimih became a valued inclusion in performance and public ceremony by Kuninjku people like Kuningbal. At times these ceremonies were performed for extended language groups in the local region.
Now a familiar and broadly depicted figure of iconography, it is important to acknowledge the development of this quite recent sculptural tradition. The depiction of this particular spirit being, once used as an addition to the sharing of song cycles and ceremony, has since been elevated to a prominent form and subject of contemporary sculpture. Variation in the creation of mimih acts as an indication of the individualism of each artist and their stylistic markers. Additionally significant to note is that in the space of the past thirty years the mimih has begun being produced by multiple language groups residing in the Maningrida area including the traditional owners of Maningrida, the Ndjébbana, speaking Kunibidji as well as Gurrgoni people who have strong ties to Kuninjku.
________
*Maningrida Arts & Culture acknowledge the work of many academic and non-academic voices when writing on this topic, it is important to note Luke Taylor, who’s broad research has informed this text.