Caption: Mother Earth and Father Space (Stealing a kiss during the war against humanity), 2004
© Courtesy Trevor Nickolls
Trevor Nickolls’s work often hits you like you a punch in the face. It also offers bold, original visions of Australia – visions of how it is now, but also of how it might be.
Nickolls might well see himself as representing the ‘other side’ – too often rendered invisible or misrepresented – in the conflict between European and Indigenous societies and worldviews. His paintings and drawings dramatically foreground the collision between white and Indigenous cultures and the violent effects of white guns, jails and land grabs on Indigenous lives and Dreamings.
According to exhibition curator Michael O’Ferrall, Nickolls is one of the pioneers of a generation of Indigenous artists who struggled to create a place for themselves within the cultural mainstream – this during an era of unprecedented flowering of Indigenous protest and expression. Nickolls’s ‘dreamtime machinetime’ imagery depicted the Indigenous experience of white colonialism in new ways, forging a path for later artists.
Nickolls, who lives in Adelaide and is a Nunga man on his mother’s side, now enjoys a respected place in Australian art. His works appear in most state art collections and in 1990 he represented Australia in the Venice Biennale alongside the celebrated Kimberley painter Rover Thomas. He has been called the ‘father of urban Indigenous art’, a title that the visual complexity and unique symbology of his practice clearly justify. This survey exhibition at the Ian Potter brings together more than 50 paintings and drawings and cements his status as an artist of great note over a 35-year time span.
Yet in his long career he has not always received the widespread mainstream recognition he deserves. He has complained that the prices of his work went down after the Biennale, while the work of Thomas, painting in a more traditional mode, became ever more popular. This may have had something to do with the confronting aspects of Nickolls’s work, which portray the effects of white culture on Indigenous life as crudely destructive.
Viewing the work, it’s tempting to suggest that Nickolls might have been at ease in any artistic milieu – as a traditional Indigenous man; a medieval creator of frescoes; a designer in the bloom of French art nouveau; a cubist in the manner of Picasso; a surrealist; or a creator of street art during the angry sixties and seventies. He utilises all these genres and worldviews, and more.
Of course, Nickolls might respond that his art is of its time, and that to transpose his artistic provenance onto other milieus is an attempt to co-opt it – he’s using a variety of traditions to turn white culture on its head.
Nickolls’s work is neither overly serious nor academic. It’s visually compelling, positively pulsates with life and movement, and includes much sly humour. There’s also an extremely strong technical facility in disparate areas. The colour palette is satisfying to the eye, the use of line sure and inspired, and there are complex, sometimes decorative patternings that might have pleased William Morris. Nickolls has studied the techniques of Papunya artists and his use of dot painting and related techniques adds to the richness of his work.
Part of the power of Nickolls’s work is the energy that emerges from figures and objects deliberately flattened on the plane. While the figuration evokes many art traditions it’s often inspired by comic book and graffiti art, as well as traditional Indigenous figuration.
Nickolls is a symbolist as well as a conceptual artist – symbols frequently invade all parts of the canvas and often include traditional Indigenous motifs such as the emu and the snake. Many of the associations will remain obscure to non-Indigenous viewers but this does not lessen the power of the paintings.
The vibrancy of Nickolls’s canvases expresses not so much optimism but a force that simply cannot be eradicated even in the face of terrible loss and wrongdoing. Nickolls shows that Indigenous Australians and their cultures are damaged by Western culture, but that Indigenous cultures are still infinitely powerful. This power comes not from some Western notion of military superiority or individual ego but from black peoples’ strong associations with the earth and skies, with the natural world.
‘Deaths in custody’ 1990 is a complex, confronting painting. It depicts a strong young Indigenous man in prison, the palms of his hands foregrounded as he clutches at the bars of his tiny cell. Surrounded by totemic images, some of which may represent his life and Dreaming, he is at once immensely powerful and helpless in the face of an institutionalised brutality, emphasised by the claustrophobic domination of the cell walls’ clinker bricks.
The man’s strength is in his body and his embodied spirituality, and it has not left him: but it is also, somehow, a threat to him in this hostile environment, something he may use against himself. And there is another, related threat to this man: white representations of him as an Indigenous male prisoner. Behind him is a disturbing image of an Indigenous man who has been hung, set against the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flag, and to his right a television camera. He’s as much imprisoned by white images of Indigenous people as he is by the ‘justice’ system – the picture itself was taken from a photograph of an Indigenous prisoner that appeared in a Brisbane newspaper.
For Nickolls the violences of mainstream culture demand a holistic response, demand that the artist open himself up and expose himself to the world through his art. Many works have strong psychological associations, graphically depicting the effects of the culture clash on Indigenous minds, hearts and bodies. These are complex works that suggest multiple meanings. Often present is a sense of visual overload, replicating the pressures and contradictions of living as an Indigenous person in a predominantly white Australian culture.
‘Inside looking out 2’ 1998 is dominated by a light-coloured mask with Indigenous patternings and no face behind it. Instead, the mask is bounded by three walls, suggesting white modes of living or the prison yard, while the holes in the mask evoke sadistic capture and enclosure. The sense of spiritual and cultural loss here is stark, but the violences of assimilation go beyond a living death to death itself – the mask in some way resembles a skull, and inside or behind the mask two fingers clutch a cigarette.
‘A man with the blues’ recalls Picasso, but the man’s body is infused with Indigenous symbolism, and to the right of the brightly painted red-and-green fire are snake and emu motifs. There’s a very free use of colour here in a beautifully formal design.
Symbols of Western society appear frequently and suggest lifelessness, militarism, the pursuit of money, industrial processes and chaos (the last an interesting inversion in itself, given the West's obsession with order and efficiency). They’re often painted in dolorous greys, for example in ‘State bank dreamings’ 1993 and ‘Urban scream’ 1993.
But Nickolls never gets so caught up in the conflict that he can’t witness the beauty and power of the life force sustaining Indigenous cultures. A later work, ‘Mother Earth and Father Space (Stealing a kiss during the war against humanity)’ 2004, with its dense and complex patternings and symbols, celebrates and foregrounds the forces of life while quietly asserting Indigenous ownership of the land of plenty, depicting Australia as a potential paradise.
Much earlier works, ‘River and hills’ c1984, ‘River landscape’ 1984 and ‘Billabong’ 1985, all use curved and straight lines (and sometimes dots) to map out serene Australian landscapes. In these paintings sparse trees add to the serenity. Especially in ‘River and hills’, the boundary between the symbolic and the ‘real’ is never firm. The colours used in these calm paintings combine with the strong lines to soothe the viewer into appreciating the beauty and harmony of the land.
Nickolls seems to have become more playful in the 1990s, with his ironic use of Indigenous ancestral figures placed in modern consumer contexts in works such as ‘Family in blue Holden’ 1998 and ‘Spirit 98’ 1998. As with so much of his art, the irony is fuelled by the huge gulf between the two worldviews that white colonialism has forced into confrontation with each other. Nickolls could be suggesting here that the ‘Dreaming’ has been stolen and commercialised by non-Indigenous Australians. At the same time, whites want Indigenous Australians to be just like them, a variant on white consumers – only then, perhaps, will Indigenous cultures become part of Australia’s myth-making about itself.
There is a lot of humour in this group of works, and I was struck by their daring: would some Indigenous peoples object to the use of such imagery in the same way a Catholic might object to ‘Piss Christ’?
A collection of Nickolls’s drawings that span 1973 to 2006 are also included in the exhibition, and they too show a wide variety of styles and influences. The elaborate patterning in ‘Trees, from the Bethesda series' 1987 is particularly striking.
Nickolls’s work has continued to evolve, and later pieces seem to suggest a return to land. The stunning colour palettes in these works recall but are not confined to traditional colours and media. ‘Kimberley under the stars’ 2002 features rock-like land forms painted in a brilliant red with orange patternings. They’re set against a dramatic black sky in which stars float in white, floral-like patterns.
If Nickolls portrays the world from the ‘other side’ in this exhibition, in another way he wants to show both sides, that of white and black, but from an Indigenous standpoint. Nickolls has said that he wants his work to bridge the gap between the Western and traditional art traditions. In so doing it offers blistering insights into the damage visited on Indigenous people on multiple levels – material, psychological, spiritual. Because of this forensic skill, Nickolls's work could be seen as a possible starting point for a healing process between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures.
The exhibition is on at the Ian Potter, Swanston St Carlton (between Faraday and Elgin streets), until 2 August, and will then tour Victoria, the Northern Territory, the ACT and South Australia.
Verdict: Stunning and confronting work
For more recent arts coverage, visit my new blog Feminist Culture Muncher!
For more recent arts coverage, visit my new blog Feminist Culture Muncher!
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