CompNet Systems

377815582407026

Desert to the Sea

 “I know it’s Karajarri land. We got Karajarri rock — three of them. There’s a salt place. There’s Bidyadanga. That’s called Black Rock. Did they tell you the story for that place?”
 – Bernadette Thomas

This artwork reflects the artist’s connection to Bidyadanga, a place where the desert meets the sea. Through colour, pattern, and texture, the painting captures important themes that shape the identity of the community and Art Centre.

Bidyadanga sits on Karajarri Country, where desert Country meets saltwater Country. The community is home to Karajarri people and to desert families who travelled from the Great Sandy Desert to La Grange Mission in the 1960s and 70s, during a time when drought and changing conditions dried desert water sources. The first five language groups to build the community together were Nyangumarta, Mangala, Yulparija, Juwaliny and Karajarri. Today, Bidyadanga continues to grow, welcoming families from across the Kimberley, Pilbara and beyond, creating a strong and diverse cultural community.

Artists draw on stories of place, family, movement, and survival — caring for both land and sea, hunting and fishing, and living between two immense environments. Patterns, marks, and flowing forms echo desert dunes, waterholes, tidal flats, reefs, bushfoods, and sea life, honouring the knowledge held across generations.

In this work, the artist celebrates the beauty of Country and community, offering a glimpse into the rich histories, cultural strength, and enduring connection to land, sea, and way of life.

By CompNet Systems, ago

377815582407024

Desert to the Sea

This artwork reflects the artist’s connection to Bidyadanga, a place where the desert meets the sea. Through colour, pattern, and texture, the painting captures important themes that shape the identity of the community and Art Centre.

Bidyadanga sits on Karajarri Country, where desert Country meets saltwater Country. The community is home to Karajarri people and to desert families who travelled from the Great Sandy Desert to La Grange Mission in the 1960s and 70s, during a time when drought and changing conditions dried desert water sources. The first five language groups to build the community together were Nyangumarta, Mangala, Yulparija, Juwaliny and Karajarri. Today, Bidyadanga continues to grow, welcoming families from across the Kimberley, Pilbara and beyond, creating a strong and diverse cultural community.

Artists draw on stories of place, family, movement, and survival — caring for both land and sea, hunting and fishing, and living between two immense environments. Patterns, marks, and flowing forms echo desert dunes, waterholes, tidal flats, reefs, bushfoods, and sea life, honouring the knowledge held across generations.

In this work, the artist celebrates the beauty of Country and community, offering a glimpse into the rich histories, cultural strength, and enduring connection to land, sea, and way of life.

By CompNet Systems, ago

377815582407023

Desert to the Sea

This artwork reflects the artist’s connection to Bidyadanga, a place where the desert meets the sea. Through colour, pattern, and texture, the painting captures important themes that shape the identity of the community and Art Centre.

Bidyadanga sits on Karajarri Country, where desert Country meets saltwater Country. The community is home to Karajarri people and to desert families who travelled from the Great Sandy Desert to La Grange Mission in the 1960s and 70s, during a time when drought and changing conditions dried desert water sources. The first five language groups to build the community together were Nyangumarta, Mangala, Yulparija, Juwaliny and Karajarri. Today, Bidyadanga continues to grow, welcoming families from across the Kimberley, Pilbara and beyond, creating a strong and diverse cultural community.

Artists draw on stories of place, family, movement, and survival — caring for both land and sea, hunting and fishing, and living between two immense environments. Patterns, marks, and flowing forms echo desert dunes, waterholes, tidal flats, reefs, bushfoods, and sea life, honouring the knowledge held across generations.

In this work, the artist celebrates the beauty of Country and community, offering a glimpse into the rich histories, cultural strength, and enduring connection to land, sea, and way of life.

By CompNet Systems, ago

377815582407022

Desert to the Sea

This artwork reflects the artist’s connection to Bidyadanga, a place where the desert meets the sea. Through colour, pattern, and texture, the painting captures important themes that shape the identity of the community and Art Centre.

Bidyadanga sits on Karajarri Country, where desert Country meets saltwater Country. The community is home to Karajarri people and to desert families who travelled from the Great Sandy Desert to La Grange Mission in the 1960s and 70s, during a time when drought and changing conditions dried desert water sources. The first five language groups to build the community together were Nyangumarta, Mangala, Yulparija, Juwaliny and Karajarri. Today, Bidyadanga continues to grow, welcoming families from across the Kimberley, Pilbara and beyond, creating a strong and diverse cultural community.

Artists draw on stories of place, family, movement, and survival — caring for both land and sea, hunting and fishing, and living between two immense environments. Patterns, marks, and flowing forms echo desert dunes, waterholes, tidal flats, reefs, bushfoods, and sea life, honouring the knowledge held across generations.

In this work, the artist celebrates the beauty of Country and community, offering a glimpse into the rich histories, cultural strength, and enduring connection to land, sea, and way of life.

By CompNet Systems, ago

377815582407021

Desert to the Sea

This artwork reflects the artist’s connection to Bidyadanga, a place where the desert meets the sea. Through colour, pattern, and texture, the painting captures important themes that shape the identity of the community and Art Centre.

Bidyadanga sits on Karajarri Country, where desert Country meets saltwater Country. The community is home to Karajarri people and to desert families who travelled from the Great Sandy Desert to La Grange Mission in the 1960s and 70s, during a time when drought and changing conditions dried desert water sources. The first five language groups to build the community together were Nyangumarta, Mangala, Yulparija, Juwaliny and Karajarri. Today, Bidyadanga continues to grow, welcoming families from across the Kimberley, Pilbara and beyond, creating a strong and diverse cultural community.

Artists draw on stories of place, family, movement, and survival — caring for both land and sea, hunting and fishing, and living between two immense environments. Patterns, marks, and flowing forms echo desert dunes, waterholes, tidal flats, reefs, bushfoods, and sea life, honouring the knowledge held across generations.

In this work, the artist celebrates the beauty of Country and community, offering a glimpse into the rich histories, cultural strength, and enduring connection to land, sea, and way of life.

By CompNet Systems, ago

377815582407019

Desert to the Sea

This artwork reflects the artist’s connection to Bidyadanga, a place where the desert meets the sea. Through colour, pattern, and texture, the painting captures important themes that shape the identity of the community and Art Centre.

Bidyadanga sits on Karajarri Country, where desert Country meets saltwater Country. The community is home to Karajarri people and to desert families who travelled from the Great Sandy Desert to La Grange Mission in the 1960s and 70s, during a time when drought and changing conditions dried desert water sources. The first five language groups to build the community together were Nyangumarta, Mangala, Yulparija, Juwaliny and Karajarri. Today, Bidyadanga continues to grow, welcoming families from across the Kimberley, Pilbara and beyond, creating a strong and diverse cultural community.

Artists draw on stories of place, family, movement, and survival — caring for both land and sea, hunting and fishing, and living between two immense environments. Patterns, marks, and flowing forms echo desert dunes, waterholes, tidal flats, reefs, bushfoods, and sea life, honouring the knowledge held across generations.

In this work, the artist celebrates the beauty of Country and community, offering a glimpse into the rich histories, cultural strength, and enduring connection to land, sea, and way of life.

By CompNet Systems, ago

377815582407017

Shades of the Sky

“What inspired me to do this painting and to paint with these colours is when you sit on the beach in the late afternoon and look out at the sunset — you see all these beautiful colours. It almost looks like a painting. It makes me feel calm and relaxed.”
 – Tahlia Badal

This artwork reflects the artist’s connection to Bidyadanga, a place where the desert meets the sea. Through colour, pattern, and texture, the painting captures important themes that shape the identity of the community and Art Centre.

Bidyadanga sits on Karajarri Country, where desert Country meets saltwater Country. The community is home to Karajarri people and to desert families who travelled from the Great Sandy Desert to La Grange Mission in the 1960s and 70s, during a time when drought and changing conditions dried desert water sources. The first five language groups to build the community together were Nyangumarta, Mangala, Yulparija, Juwaliny and Karajarri. Today, Bidyadanga continues to grow, welcoming families from across the Kimberley, Pilbara and beyond, creating a strong and diverse cultural community.

Artists draw on stories of place, family, movement, and survival — caring for both land and sea, hunting and fishing, and living between two immense environments. Patterns, marks, and flowing forms echo desert dunes, waterholes, tidal flats, reefs, bushfoods, and sea life, honouring the knowledge held across generations.

In this work, the artist celebrates the beauty of Country and community, offering a glimpse into the rich histories, cultural strength, and enduring connection to land, sea, and way of life.

By CompNet Systems, ago

111982406892

Mimih Spirit

The mimih spirit exists in a realm that runs parallel to and mirrors many facets of human life, 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 shown in a national or international context these works communicate and exist in a particular space that is cross-cultural and simultaneously particular to the Arnhem region.

The mimih sits within a complex 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 mokuy 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. The connection and development of art forms informed by cross cultural dialogues within northern Aboriginal language groups is notable. 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. 

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*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.

By CompNet Systems, ago