Exhibition Insight... Dhigaraa galgaa baa – place of many birds
Penny Evans, Dhagway – Noisy Friar Bird, 2019.
Dhigaraa galgaa baa – place of many birds
Penny Evans
Words by Caitlin Eyre.
Caitlin is Assistant Curator at JamFactory.
Contemporary ceramic artist Penny Evans is a Gomeroi woman who lives on Bundjalung Country in northern New South Wales. Drawing on her Gomeroi heritage, Evans’ ceramic sculptures emerge from her reflections on her ancestors’ Country and its links to neighbouring places.
This solo exhibition, Dhigaraa galgaa baa - place of many birds, is Evans’ largest and most significant display of sculptures featuring dhigaraa – meaning ‘birds’ in Gamilaraay language – and represents a new direction for her ceramic practice.In her sculptural artworks, Evans utilises the hand-building techniques of pinching, coiling and slab building to investigate issues of identity and colonisation in contemporary Australia. The technique of sgrafitto features strongly in Evans’ sculptural artworks and has links to Kamilaroi traditions of carvings on trees, weapons, utensils and onto the ground for ceremonial purposes, communication and storytelling. Her work is primarily concerned with exploring the history and aftermath of colonisation, with her experience of Country invoking a deep environmental awareness. She regularly visits different natural landscapes in order to bear witness to and sense the spiritual signs of ancestral experiences in these lands.
“I listen, observe, interact and decolonise in these various neighbouring ecosystems, thinking of our ancestors and feeling the metaphysical traces of their existence through the relationships of animals, birds, plants, sky…,” Evans explains.
“The Country becomes humanised. The Country speaks to me. And although I can’t understand it the way our ancestors did, I get an inkling by listening, by observing, by feeling.”ii
Penny Evans, Biliirr – Red Tailed Black Cockatoo, 2019. Photo: Courtesy of Penny Evans.
In Dhigaraa galgaa baa - place of many birds, the series of sculptural dhigarra (birds) that Evans has crafted evokes the spirit of her Country and respond to its desecration and exploitation through land clearing, mining and cotton farming. “I’ve spent time sitting at the waterhole where my grandmothers were born over a couple of generations on Gomeroi Country in the northern basin area watching the birds, so many types of dhigaraa engaged in that landscape”, she says. For Evans, dhigarra are regarded as carriers of knowledge and connectors to place. As with many first nations people cultures, the Gomeroi people bear a complex and layered relationship with birds and their connection with the environment. These ancient understandings are preserved and maintained through the stories, songlines, art, dance and ceremony.
The vitality and spirit of Country is celebrated through the large and diverse gatherings of dhigaraa from different species, which hail from forests, heaths, wetlands, rivers and significant waterholes of Evans’ Country. The artist’s mastering of coil building and her use of vibrantly coloured slips captures both the physicality and unique spirit of each species of bird. The lively flock of dhigaraa include zebra finches, galah, black swans, a red-tailed black cockatoo and a pair of blue-faced honeyeaters, all of which are perched on heavily lined tree stumps, branches and other sturdy resting places.iii
While the vibrant and joyful dhigaraa sit peacefully on their perches, Evans’ birds are a sombre monument to the loss of cultural heritage sites and respond to the deterioration of places where dhigaraa and other native plants and animals once flourished. iv “Little Bundunn, the sacred kingfisher, along with us Gomeroi women, are responsible for our freshwater,” Evans says. “So you can imagine how we all feel about the state of the rivers in the northern basin and the whole Murray Darling Basin.” Evans’ depiction of the now extinct Paradise Parrot, for example, poignantly underscores the tragic effects that such devastation can cause on dhigaraa. “They would burrow into termite mounds to lay their eggs,” Evans explains. “The one I’ve made for the exhibition is sitting on a termite mound and I’ve carved a graphic onto the mound which represents an empty nest.”
Collectively, the abundant colourful flock speaks about the importance of the environment and the urgency of its preservation, and embody the powerful message that the ‘Spirit of Country is stronger than the devastation’.v
Penny Evans, Extinct Parrot, 2019.
References
Freja Carmichael, ‘Penny Evans: Dhigaraa galgaa baa – place of many birds’, Tarnanthi: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2019, p. 170
Penny Evans, ‘Biography’, https://pennyevansart.com/biography-penny-evans/, accessed 13 September 2019
i Penny Evans, ‘Biography’, https://pennyevansart.com/biography-penny-evans/, accessed 13 September 2019
ii Freja Carmichael, ‘Penny Evans: Dhigaraa galgaa baa – place of many birds’, Tarnanthi: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2019, p. 170
iii Carmichael, p.170
iv Carmichael, p.170
v Carmichael, p.170
All unattributed quotes in this essay are from interviews with the artist.
ESSAY:
Caitlin Eyre
EXHIBITOR:
Penny Evans
DHIGARAA GALGAA BAA - PLACE OF MANY BIRDS
12 October - 1 December 2019
JamFactory
Gallery Two
Presented as part of Tarnanthi.