{"id":1272,"date":"2012-12-05T16:46:07","date_gmt":"2012-12-05T05:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/?p=1272"},"modified":"2013-06-18T11:00:42","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T01:00:42","slug":"curators-choice-december-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/curators-choice-december-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Curator’s choice: Lydia Balbal’s Pikarong"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Lydia<\/a>

Lydia Balbal, Pikarong<\/i>, 2011, 150 x 180 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

Lydia Balbal, a Mangala woman, was born around 1958, in the remotest part of the Great Sandy Desert, near Punmu.\u00a0 She spent her childhood in these ancestral lands, untouched by exterior civilizations, until 1972, when her family left the desert to settle at the La Grange Mission, in the coastal town of Bidyadanga.<\/p>\n

Lydia\u2019s favourite subjects are natural sacred sites, and more particularly water holes located in the Mangala and Yulparija areas, which she depicts through abstract overlappings of large dots or wide stripes of shading off colours.<\/p>\n

Lydia\u2019s painting entitled Pikarong <\/em>is a typical instance of the personal aesthetics she has progressively elaborated: it presents a unique combination of ancestral traditions with innovation, by holding together on the canvas the strength of the desert age-old wisdom, knowledge and mythical beliefs, and the freedom and self-confidence of the artist\u2019s unprecedented, bold chromatic contrasts.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Pikarong <\/em>deals with a traditional subject matter. It shows a site intrinsically linked with the Aboriginals\u2019 everyday life, both practically and symbolically speaking. Firstly, Pikarong is essential to the survival of the Aboriginal peoples living in the Desert: it is a jila<\/em>, which means \u201cliving water\u201d in Lydia\u2019s language. And water, as a vital resource, occupies a primordial place in the life and imagination of the Desert peoples. For this very reason, it is a recurring theme in Lydia\u2019s work: this is where she was born, and the memories of hunting scenes, when Lydia would follow the tracks of king brown snakes with her family, influence her aesthetic reflection. Here, the lines stand for the tracks the reptile left in the sand, among other things. Furthermore, water and jilas <\/em>are omnipresent in the Desert myths and traditional narratives, for they were created by Ancestor Spirits in the Dreamtime. Because of this extremely strong connection with mythical creatures, water holes are replete with spiritual symbols and stories. They serve as the preferred stages for the performing of ritual ceremonies for the transmission of Aboriginal customs and beliefs. All these traditional elements, which permeate Lydia\u2019s painting Pikarong<\/em>, contribute to making the artist a direct heir of the aboriginal artistic practices of the Desert.<\/p>\n

However, although Lydia depicts the desert country and imbues her works with traditional symbolism, she detaches herself from her Bidyadanga predecessors by adopting a radically new perspective, shaped by her (hi)story. \u201cI\u2019m painting underground<\/em>,\u201d she once explained. \u201cWhat\u2019s underground. Upside down: <\/em>water, rockholes, lines beneath the sand-dunes.<\/em>“[1] What Lydia proposes is a differentiated experience of place. She recomposes the Pikarong <\/em>rockhole from beneath: the background canvas, covered in black paint, stands for the earth\u2019s exterior crust, and Lydia turns her gaze towards the surface, from the bottom of the well of living water.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Lydia\u2019s mesmerizing expanses of colour which sensuously unfold before the beholder\u2019s eyes and prevail over strictly figurative forms, are pregnant with totally new elements. The dominant range of deep and intense turquoise-blue tones which Lydia pours out on the whole canvas, exemplifies her take on novelty. These cool colours, breaking with the Desert\u2019s traditional use of natural pigments and ochre, conjure up the ocean, as seen from the coast in Bidyadanga. As for the white expanses, they suggest both the waves\u2019 foam and the salt crusts shining in the sun where the water withdrew. The sweeping, free moves Lydia creates catch the onlooker into the heart of a moving wave of colourful lines.<\/p>\n

The introduction of this new palette of saltwater colours in Pikarong <\/em>is the direct artistic result of Lydia\u2019s exodus out of the Desert, and of her discovering the coastal landscapes of Bidyadanga when she arrived at the Mission. Entrusted with the passing over of her knowledge of the Australian land, Lydia mingles the different viewpoints she successively adopted in the course of her life shared between the Desert and the Australian north-west coast. Pikarong <\/em>thus incorporates softer hues, associated with the traditional depiction of desert sceneries. Pink tones, embedded within the blue stripes, reveal themselves through transparency effects, visually echoing the hierarchy of interpretation levels of the founding myths of Aboriginal cultures. The imbrication of multiple chromatic tones embodies the strata of knowledge, successively accessed as one progresses in his\/her initiation.<\/p>\n

Finally, Lydia Balbal modernizes the dot, one of the most famous patterns of the aboriginal iconographic repertoire, which has been represented on the sand, on rocks or on the bodies of rites\u2019 performers for thousands of years, and is currently celebrated in the exhibition \u201cTjukurrtjanu: The Origins of Western Desert Aboriginal Art<\/em>\u201d, at the Mus\u00e9e du quai Branly. Lydia re-actualizes the traditional motif by minutely working and shaping the texture of the paint she applies on the canvas, in order to invite the viewer to renew his\/her gaze and his\/her understanding of Aboriginal painting.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, then, Pikarong<\/em> \u2013 the composition of which functions as a fractal, taking the viewer on an emotional journey through the vastness of Australian sceneries, be they geographical, spiritual or mythical \u2013 was crowned with success. It was chosen to represent contemporary Aboriginal creation in the exhibition \u201cremix<\/em>\u201d, held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2011. IDAIA is therefore immensely proud of presenting this artwork in Paris, at the Passage du Grand Cerf.<\/p>\n

B\u00e9n\u00e9dicte Vachon, Assistant Curator<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\n

Reference:<\/span>
\n1)\u00a0Rothwell, Nicolas.\u00a0“Turning Landscape on its Head”,\u00a0The Australian<\/em>.\u00a0December 8th<\/sup>, 2008<\/p>\n

About the Author:<\/span>
\nB\u00e9n\u00e9dicte\u00a0Vachon, Assistant Curator, Paris, France<\/p>\n

Learn more about artist Lydia Balbal:<\/span>
\nLydia Balbal had her first solo exhibition outside Australia with IDAIA in Paris in Oct – Dec 2012.
\n<\/i>Read more about this exhibition<\/a>, or\u00a0visit the gallery of Lydia Balbal’s paintings<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Artwork \u00a9 The Artist, Photo \u00a9 IDAIA<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read the article of our curator about Lydia Balbal’s artwork ‘Pikarong’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2736,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[51,832,58,47,828,36],"class_list":["post-1272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chroniques-curatoriales","tag-51","tag-aboriginal-art","tag-curatorial","tag-lydia-balbal","tag-news","tag-paris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1272"}],"version-history":[{"count":46,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3994,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions\/3994"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}