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Lorraine Northey Connelly
Once a symbol of cultural survival, traditional crafts have in recent years become a means of reaffirming cultural identity.
In the hands of Waradgerie artist Lorraine Northey Connelly, this rich tradition undergoes further reinterpretation. She transforms woven string baskets and coolamons into contemporary colonial artefacts, using rustic materials, synthetic paint, ochre painted on sheets of corrugated iron, scrap metals and wire netting: expressive of a shared history and her own heritage of mixed cultures.
Over the past fourteen years Lorraine has been re-discovering her childhood environments, namely the mallee and riverine, acquiring a knowledge of local native and introduced plants and their cultural uses. Lorraine's personal interest in the protection of the environment and equality for all is represented in her art, through the use of recycled materials and symbols of reconciliation.
Film - Sophie Boord, 'Lorraine Connelly Northey', 2007
Courtesy of Lorraine Connelly Northey and Sophie Boord
Film - Sophie Boord, 'Lorraine Connelly Northey', 2007
This is a exciting material, and all it is is the boring, old fly wire gauze. And it's been rusted, of course. Look at the back part of this piece of work. It even has the beautiful edges of where a window frame once was attached to it.
I think the beauty is that the gauze is where we have all these beautiful square holes, and so that quite attracts me that it's just wo-- you know, I see the beautiful weave in this, the warps and the weft of things. So although I make many other different kinds of shapes to do with traditional Aboriginal society, I quite like the bag, because these were the kind of items that I'd once was looking to make, you know, with plant material to weave.
And then the other exciting thing is the pieces of mesh-- particularly old pieces of mesh, mesh sheeting. And so they have all of these different, wonderful shapes in them. But this one has really nice, again, squares, but they're bigger squares. It's a finer wire than the gauze, but yeah, I think that that makes a beautiful bag, that one.
This is another nice piece of, like, mesh sheeting. And so to find a nice piece like that, again, you know, I can imagine there's been a lovely effect of a finished product if I had of woven that. I've actually tried to keep the edges not so, perhaps, boring, but trying to hold onto the nice rugged, roughness of an edge. There's two different bowl shapes that gatherers would have used, but here I've actually made the oval shaped bowl, or as my mum's people would call it, a coolamon.
This is a nice piece to show, and also show in a different shape as well. That this is obviously not a coolamon. It's more of the bowl shape that you and I know. So this is actually called a gall or a burl, and this actually grows as a clump on a tree.
You see these big, black kind of knobby clumps hanging off river red gums in particular. And so if we thought that they'd hung off me, the Aboriginal people would come along and cut that off me as a tree trunk. And they'd actually place hot coals inside this bowl to burn out all the rubbish inside.
Burls and galls were quite often used as, like, storage bowls. Very heavy, so they're not the kind of thing you'd want to be carting around. Once there was a sheet of mesh, and how beautiful the patterns have a wonderful, like, club kind of pattern that alternates with the circular pattern. It's a great find, and will I ever find another piece like that? I don't know.
While being raised on the weekends out in the elements, out in the Mallee near the river, our dad also allowed us to collect other kinds of things-- for example, feathers. But we also had rules about that, like, we weren't allowed to go and shoot a bird. But we tended to collect feathers that were blowing around.
So I've had this great idea that although I quite like the rawness of the tins and the irons and the wires, I also thought that I could utilize them to add another element to the pieces that I was making. And so here we actually have a feather as a fringe on a bag, and this feather is actually of an emu feather.
The gatherers successfully supply the whole family with 85% of the food. And so she's reliable, because the things that she actually gathers are very much rooted into the ground. Like, plants have roots so they're stable-- it's not like the men who are going hunting for a kangaroos that may not even be there when they get there, then they have to be able to get them.
And so as a gatherer, she's acquired this wonderful knowledge. And by the time she's a young woman, she's quite skillful at what she does. So I'm looking for all sorts of different steel to represent the digging stick. Because with that, and with a woman's knowledge, she can actually dig, dig the ground for food such as like yams or frogs.
Many sticks are actually basically a stem of a plant. There's a plant. This is the root system down here and the top of the plant.
And what will happen is, people actually try to dig a little bit of the root system, or the bulb of a root there, and trim off at the top of the stem and place that stick upside down, and now we have that nice knobby part on the top. But that bit of knob gives actually weight, and gives you that oomph in your stick. So women who are actually with a nice, fine point on them actually dig and they're actually basically loosening the ground.
So the ground is only loosened and it doesn't have the yam out yet. This wonderful shape of a coolamon or a bowl that gatherers used, this is a great shape to actually dig into the loosened ground and scoop it out and scoop it away. And then to carry her foods in, she's actually has a bag. And so a string bag, a bag made of string, of plant fiber, is very collapsible.
That's the idea of a string bag, because there are baskets in her bags. So baskets have more of a solid form. Certainly like this bag here I've made represents more of a basket that is not collapsible, that is quiet in its shapes-- it's restricted.
So with those kind of tools and implements, the gatherer becomes quite a powerful part of a family. And then going back to camp, she has all these kind of storage containers that we talked about-- the burls and the galls. So these become these wonderful containers that are represented here in galvanized corrugated iron.
These two here, these are the same kind of materials. This is from the bottom piece of a cockey's fence. It's quite open wide that people refer to as chook wire. But in fact, it's actually rabbit proofing a fence, so it's rabbit-proof wire. When you can see the open holes quite clearly where I've used his shape to show a burl or an gall which becomes a storage container.
And I've also looked at things like the work, the work that goes into a gatherer. So she becomes a sewer, a manufacturer of making needles, sewing cloaks and the like, and also lots of grinding goes on. Particular like mum's people again, this is the people growing seeds. They're quite equipped with pieces like this, a grindstone. The bottom piece is stone. The slab matches the stone above, and then whatever's in between becomes ground.
So these would, for mum's people, would actually be seeds from grasses. And then they also had quite big, long slabs as big as surfboards, but they're called grind slabs that they would actually also have another piece like a rolling pin that they could actually go up and down, work up and down the board and grind lots of things at a very quick pace. So you have to think about if you have tribes or groups, families or clans, maybe 300 people, some might be 3,000 people, some clans may have 30,000 people. So a lot of hands, a lot of work, a lot of grinding.
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Courtesy of Lorraine Connelly Northey and Sophie Boord
Lorraine Connelly Northey talks about her art, and the way her mixed heritage informs her practice: as she takes traditional forms and materials such as the coolamon and ochre, and combines them with materials such as scrap iron, and wire netting.
Lorraine Connelly Northey is a Waradgerie woman, born in Swan Hill. Her work, seen as reinterpreting traditional forms as post-colonial objects, has been widely exhibited.
Film - Sophie Boord, 'Lorraine Connelly Northey Talks about Process', 2007
Courtesy of Lorraine Connelly Northey and Sophie Boord
Film - Sophie Boord, 'Lorraine Connelly Northey Talks about Process', 2007
So as one of six children, our non-Aboriginal dad would take us out camping for the weekend, because it was really tough, and we didn't have much money, and we'd pretty much lived off the land-- Dad teaching us what he knew about the bush craft. And also I think a lot of pretending he knew lots about other things to do with Aboriginal Australia and traditional Aboriginal lifestyle.
He would tell us, if the bird eats that kind of fruit, you can eat that too. But as an adult, you realize that there are certain fruits for birds that are not for human consumption.
But the other wonderful thing with Dad teaching us about wildlife and the waterways, even right down to the landscapes and different soils, he also taught us a lot about the flora and fauna, and certainly, the flora really did attract my attention as a young person.
And then also a lot of spending lots of time with Mum and doing different kinds of works to do with hand crafts. When Mum would not have the time or had to go somewhere or an interruption, Mum would actually allow me to continue on with her piece of art, whether it was crochet or some kind of fiber work or something, Mum would actually get me to fill the gap while she was gone. So here I was also, you know, not only learning about all what the bush had to offer in traditional Aboriginal lifestyle through Dad, but also learning the arts and crafts, using your hands to make a manufacture works through Mum as well.
So I'd learned that I was very good with my hands. Because if I wasn't, Mum wouldn't have let me.
So these were great things I had as foundations, I suppose, to fall back on as I because older and adult. And then I went on to become a public servant after retiring from the public service. I actually decided that Aboriginal basket-weaving quite interests me. So I thought, this is a great idea and a good excuse to get back at into the Mallee and the river area, and look at those things that Dad had taught me as a young girl.
And so I was able to would actually access Dad and con Dad up to take me out-- take me back out bush. And so this is what we actually did. Over a period of about five years. Because my idea was that I didn't what my weaving to look like everybody else's. And so I decided that instead of using the same plants-- the reputable plants-- I would use something different. I would use different plants.
So when I went out exploring the different kinds of plants, I was quite shocked at how many plants there were. So I had to really narrow it down, and I had to make decisions about which plants I would use. And I thought, perhaps if I just use the plants that I can learn about that are like of Aboriginal usage. Perhaps that would narrow it down quite nicely. So this is a decision that I made. And then I realized there were all these great categories that I could get from these plants like medicinal plants rather than a reed from the river. I was convinced that that would make me very distinguished from all the weavers to date.
But the other beautiful thing about out in the bush exploring with someone like Dad, we'd always come across old rubbish dumps. And Dad can't help himself, but he was a scavenger. Certainly where I've got it from. So we'd rummage through and look at these old tips for pieces of interest.
And Dad had kicked a pieced of rusty old corrugated iron and was saying to me, why don't I use this kind of material in my art work? I kind of screwed mine eyes up and thought, what would I do with a rusty old bit of tin? And he kept kind of going on about it, and really just to shut him up, you know, I did pick up the piece of tin. And I did put it in the car, and I took it home. So it kind of hung around me. And I suppose it probably irritated me more than anything else, this bit of tin. And I don't know, I decided I'd do something about it to kind of please Dad, who was a regular visitor of my house.
So a couple of days later, Dad had rocked up with an old axe head-- a rusty old axe head. I'd decided that I would use this as a quite a heavy weight to bang around and reshape the tin. I realized that I'd actually made the shape of what could be a gatherer's bowl, known as a coolamon. And so I actually asked Mum, who was visiting at the time, you know, what did she think that shape was? And she said, oh, a coolamon, of course.
I realized I was suddenly a sculptor. I could sculpt all sorts of things to do with all those shapes, to do all that knowledge I had been acquiring. It was certainly unique. No one else was doing it. So I thought, this is great stuff. And so I thought, well, I could afford to experiment, and I'd leave that weaving perhaps of up my sleeve.
So this is pretty exciting having or being able to develop an art practice with found materials. And so now I've had to work out how do I go about that, and how do I get that closest to what I'd set out to do with weaving? And so I've done a lot of thinking, and a lot of experimenting and collecting and working out, what kind of found materials best match or come closest to a finished product of something that I would have woven.
So I'm looking at the weavings of all around Australia. I'm looking at the different loops in the weave. And I'm looking at the different end products of the weave. So some weaves, for example, in Northern Territory, there are magnificent, quite intricate, rectangular shapes. And then we get into the beautiful diamond-y shapes of down in the bottom of Australia, and all sorts of things. And so this is interesting that we have these different shapes within a weave, because it allows me to be a bit more open for which would I collect and scrounge for.
And McClellan Art Gallery, their gallery director at the time I was exhibiting there had written an article and talked about how he saw that I was actually collecting materials that best matched what a finished product or woven material looked like. So I was pretty excited with this person that he had actually cottoned on to what I was doing.
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Craft - Basket and Birds, Lorraine Connelly Northey, Private Collection
Courtesy of Lorraine Connelly Northey
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Craft - Basket and Birds, Lorraine Connelly Northey, Private Collection
Courtesy of Lorraine Connelly Northey
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