2016 Old Land, New Marks

Curated by Djon Mundine, Old Land New Marks featured Lonsdale among artists presenting works of significant impact. Video pieces by Karla Dickens and others framed the exhibition with the geography of New South Wales – the Tweed to the north, the Darling to the west, the Murray to the south – while Barkindji singing filled the corners of the space with resonant incantations. Teena McCarthy’s monumental pieces, printed on the delicate skin of butchers’ paper, further jar our sense of scale by depicting the face as landscape portraiture, while Michael Philp’s abstract portraits depict father and son fishing in a form both startling and contemplative.

Two kangaroo cloaks by Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi artist Lynette Riley drew the eye and invite close reading. One honoured legendary rights activist Pearl Gibbs, and the other is for Bungaree, the man who not only circumnavigated Australia with Matthew Flinders, but was the first person to be called an Australian when Flinders first coined the term Terra Australis.

While history records Bungaree as the first Australian, in his floor talk Mundine reminded us that to walk across the entire Australian continent is to walk on the bodies of the innumerably millions of people who have come before: “layer upon layer of relationships to the land.”

Lonsdale had first presented Disambiguation at even larger scale for Cementa 2015 in Kandos. There, she told us in her floor talk, “the rivers ran red with the blood of the people from the massacres, so I wanted to show [the] Aboriginal interests as represented by the ochre in each circle. Aboriginal cultural interests are now being dominated by the coal mining industry, so around Mudgee, Kandos, it's mines everywhere, and that takes precedence and priority over Aboriginal peoples’ cultural values, farmers’ values. I wanted to show that ripple effect through time.”

Sourced via the National Association for the Visual Arts: https://visualarts.net.au/news-opinion/2016/artlands-dubbo/