Distinctive ceramic works by Naomi Hobson mark not only a new direction in her art practice, but also a celebration of Indigenous culture and people coming together over great distances.
Naomi Hobson is one of a new generation of contemporary Indigenous artists who is already making her mark nationally. Hobson is from the Kaantju/Umpila language group and grew up in the township of Coen, near the Lockhart River community in North Queensland’s remote Cape York Peninsula. A region of extensive lush rainforests, vast open country bounded by snaking rivers and the sea, Hobson speaks of her experiences of a country passed down to her through more than a thousand generations, that is a source of inspiration and gives her ‘the power to imagine . . . and the freedom to create things’.1
Primarily a painter, Hobson first began to experiment with art at the formative Lockhart River Arts Centre, and studied art at college in Cairns before working as a researcher for the city’s Indigenous Library Services, where she become closely involved with new education and ranger programs. Hobson went on to attend the Canberra Institute of Technology, but returned to Cairns, and to art, in 2008, where she studied under painter Julie Poulson and printmaker Theo Tremblay, among others.2
Hobson began exhibiting works in 2012, and her canvases have appeared in several significant international and domestic exhibitions, including in QAGOMA’s own 2015 exhibition ‘GOMA Q: Contemporary Queensland Art’. Recently, she turned to the medium of clay, and has since become the central figure in the establishment of mainland Australia’s most northerly ceramics program — the Kalan Clay House — based in her hometown of Coen.
The Gallery acquired these two works directly from the 2017 Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, which was the first public display of her new work in clay. Finely hand-built cylindrical structures with tapering necks, the dancing poles are made of ochre-coloured clay, incised through a white underglaze with patterns based on skin designs of circles and triangles.
Hobson has said that the pole with the triangular designs indicates journeys — tracks that people follow across the land to meet and celebrate with dance and ceremony. The pole with the circles of various sizes indicates the many meeting places, large and small (or, of adults and children), along these same paths. While the two pieces are individual, together they represent the sharing of culture and celebration through dance and people coming together over great distances.3
The best-known practitioner of the Indigenous ceramic tradition in this region was pioneering female artist Thanakupi (Thaynakwith people, 1937–2011), who often spoke of her Cairns-based practice as working with the very sands of her country. Naomi Hobson’s enterprise further north combines her skill in both ceramics and painting with her strong belief in the importance of education and Indigenous heritage. She is set to foster a new generation of art production in the region.
Simon Elliott is Deputy Director, Collection and Exhibitions, QAGOMA
Endnotes 1Naomi Hobson: Kanichi – On Top People [exhibition catalogue], Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 2016, unpaginated. 2 Naomi Hobson, Artist Profile, 14 September 2016, http://www.artistprofile.com.au/naomi-hobson/, accessed 12 January 2018. 3 The artist, in conversation with the author, Cairns 2017.
Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.
It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name or reproduce photographs of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.
Featured image detail: Naomi Hobson Malkarti Pole (Dancing Pole) 201
Objects rather than paintings can reveal the rich history of Indigenous Australian culture from colonial times to the present day.
Over tens of thousands of years, vigorous contact between Queensland’s many Indigenous language groups has meant an equally long history of shield-making, but despite their popularity and sophistication, these important cultural works are yet to receive wide recognition as a mainstay of Australian art.
Shields from the rainforest region of north Queensland — known in the Djirubal language as bigan — were commonly cut from the exposed buttress roots of ficus trees, however, a number of shields from this region are made from hardwood. Bigan shields tend to be around one metre tall — larger than shields from the rest of the country. These great oval or crescent-shaped objects are lightweight and decoratively patterned.
Less well known are the smaller, heavier shields of southern and central Queensland, loosely referred to as Gulmari (or Goomeri, Gulmardi) shields — a term that has been associated with the small town of Goomeri in the South Burnett region. This name has become popular with galleries and auction houses when describing this style of shield. Unlike rainforest shields, Gulmari shields are often deeply incised, featuring blocky, relief-carved geometric designs on hardwood.
Shields from western and central Queensland bear the influences of their painted cousins from eastern regions, which then appear to merge with the linear designs of the Central and Western Desert. These shields tend to be smaller, thickly cut, and have rounded ends — their linear decorations rendered in a restricted palette of red and white.
Together, these shields — some older than 130 years — have witnessed massive social change and upheaval through European colonisation. As the Australian colonies were established, anthropologists, ethnographic collectors and frontiersmen frequently acquired Indigenous shields, weapons and tools, with little apparent concern for recording the details of their makers.
Simon Elliott is Deputy Director, Collection and Exhibitions. For their expertise and advice, he wishes to thank Bill Evans and Michael Aird, Director, UQ Anthropology Museum.
Contemporary shields
The designs on contemporary shields by Michael Anning show familiarity with the rich natural variety of the rainforest. Looking at them, one can walk through Michael Anning’s country from the savannah to the sea.
The scorpion on Rainforest shield (scorpion design) and sword 2000-01 prefers a dry terrain, as scorpions live in bush at the edge of the rainforest, however, the pond skater, on Rainforest shield (pond skater design) and sword 2000-01, is a little rainforest insect living in forest creeks. Pond skaters use bits of bark or leaves to make rafts and Anning says they remind him of Indigenous people. The comparison is exact — rainforest men used shields to float across rivers, as the native fig wood from which they are made is very buoyant.
The ochred sword is both a signature and a tribute. It shows the backbone of the eels that swim the rainforest creeks and it is the artist’s totemic animal. Anning’s traditional name is Boiyool. This was a mythical being, half-human and half-eel, which travelled up rivers and visited significant sites when the land was being created.
‘I, object’ (7 August 2020 – 29 August 2021) looked at the many complex relationships Indigenous Australian artists have to objects: from the histories informing their creation, to the social and cultural consequences of their collection.
Many Indigenous people consider their cultural objects akin to family or a part of themselves – a physical, tangible product of their cultural inheritances. Throughout the world many museums hold important Indigenous cultural material. These are considered ancestors by many, and are a great source of pride and inspiration. However, their multi-generational housing in public and private collections, is also a great source of cultural loss and trauma.
Works that celebrate the survival of sculptural traditions, works that witness a revival of regional Queensland mark making traditions has its roots in collected objects, and works that mourn the loss of cultural strength or life when objects are removed from their origin communities. Together, these works and artists help to reshape the ways we relate to objects and a history of objectification.
In bringing these objects together with works by other traditional and contemporary Indigenous artists, ‘I, Object’ aimed to celebrate the great creative legacy of Queensland Indigenous peoples, and in turn attract further scholarship and promote a renewed connection between these objects and their traditional custodians.
For many Aboriginal groups in Queensland and across the country, colonisation has affected many aspects of cultural and artistic traditions, which has led to the displacement of objects from their makers — and, in turn, the displacement of the makers from their traditional country.
As the state’s premier visual arts collecting institution, QAGOMA acknowledges this shared history and is conscious that displaying such historical cultural material in a museum context may remind people of this great loss of cultural inheritance.
Acknowledgment of Country The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name or reproduce photographs of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.
A striking drawing in blue wax pastel by Mackay-born Danie Mellor explores the complex, often troubling intersections between Indigenous and frontier histories, and brings to light the complicated narratives of Australia’s colonial past.
The pleasure and vexation of history 2017 is reminiscent of a tropical paradise — an idyll of tranquillity. Skilfully hand-drawn, and based on early carte de visite and postcard photography of Queensland rainforests, the work depicts a waterfall pouring into a deep pool, surrounded by lush, dense vegetation. In the foreground, three Aboriginal people complete the picture of pristine natural beauty.
Danie Mellor ‘The pleasure and vexation of history’
As with many of Mellor’s rainforest scenes, however, there is a sting in the tail: the figures in the foreground are unaware of the European man surveying the scene, gazing down at them from atop the waterfall. Mellor has imagined this encounter between First People and European explorers as the ‘calm before the storm’, in a setting that belies what is to come. In this work, Mellor reflects on the breadth of colonial experience, while also contemplating historical confrontations between settler culture and his maternal Mamu and Ngadjon ancestors from Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands.
Danie Mellor, Mamu/Ngadjonji and Anglo-Australian heritage, Australia b.1971 / The pleasure and vexation of history (detail) 2017
Mellor’s composition plays with the dichotomy of the ‘unspoilt paradise’ of colonial Australia and the dystopic realities for Indigenous peoples and societies in its path. He poses Bama (people) naturalistically within an idealistic rainforest setting, and then juxtaposes them with a well-dressed European figure, to reinforce the differing ways people viewed the bounty and resources of this fertile land.
A distinctive feature of many of Mellor’s images is his captivating use of a predominant palette of blue. While studying in Birmingham early in his career, Mellor was intrigued by the blue landscapes on Spode dinnerware and tea sets. The famous English ceramics company, founded in 1770, created blue-and-white chinaware painted with scenes from foreign lands for export across the globe. These mass-produced images of faraway places are cleansed — exotic, but stripped of their true nature. Mellor plays on these ideas and conventions, exaggerating the ideal, naturalistic scene, and incorporating broader source material, after having absorbed influences from both contemporary and archival photographs and imagery.
In the words of the artist:
The pleasure and vexation of history presents a synopsis of power, an uncomfortable, even sinister, interruption to the allegorical story of timeless harmony unfolding. Its imagery deliberately invokes stereotypes and disarming clichés, and plays on historical narratives generated from unfounded assumptions around Aboriginal people and their cultural and social practice. In this piece, the pleasure of the gaze is heightened in the enchantment of a scene that connotes historical authenticity, and then countered with the vexation of multiple narratives that deviate from and coalesce around attested reality.
Like Danie Mellor’s best works, The pleasure and vexation of history powerfully but subtly articulates a postcolonial history of Australia from the perspectives of both European and Aboriginal heritages, and re-envisages the collision of settler occupation on the unceded Indigenous lands of Queensland.
Simon Elliott is Deputy Director, Collection and Exhibitions, QAGOMA
Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.
It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name or reproduce photographs of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.
Featured image detail: Danie Mellor The pleasure and vexation of history 2017
Jon Molvig (1923-70) was an acclaimed Australian artist and charismatic teacher, whose uncompromising commitment to painting inspired a group of young artists in Brisbane. Simon Elliott spoke with some of the artist’s former students about their mentor.
An intensely complicated artist, and a fiercely independent individual, Jon Molvig (1923–70) was a relentless innovator, and his visual experiments are both iconoclastic and provocative. In a move that proved to be a major catalyst in his career, the Newcastle-born artist settled in Brisbane in 1955, dominating the city’s art scene in the late 1950s and throughout the following decade. Formidable, passionate and rebellious, Molvig purposely turned his back on the art centres of Sydney and Melbourne, choosing Brisbane but also agitating against the timid nature of its art scene at the time. With great energy, he worked through figure studies, portraits and landscapes, making radical stylistic shifts to suit his subject matter. The city inspired his greatest work, and it was from here that his influence spread across Australia.
Molvig had an unsettled childhood: his mother, who was from a farming family that had lived in Australia for generations, died when he was just two years old. His father was a Norwegian sailor employed by the BHP steel works in working-class Newcastle. As a young man, Molvig served in New Guinea and the Philippines during World War Two, and on his return, he studied art at the East Sydney Technical College (1947–49) under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme. He then travelled through Europe until 1952. Influenced by German and Norwegian expressionists, his raw and expressive painting soon rose to national prominence.
At the heart of Molvig’s work is a superb sense of draftsmanship. It was through his fine draftsmanship — and his all-encompassing commitment to his work — that he inspired countless students in the late 1950s at the studio at St Mary’s Anglican Church, Kangaroo Point, in classes originally run by John Rigby (who had inherited the role from Margaret Cilento). Many artists who spent their formative years in Molvig’s classes still speak highly of his vision and determination, some five decades later.
Pamela Wilson — a former student, and a practising painter and ceramist in Brisbane at the time — remembers the artist being ‘very keen to let us draw the way we saw, but he did look for a different vision . . . He had a different way of looking at the world’.1 She recalls his approach as supportive, but not prescriptive. ‘He never, as I remember, picked up charcoal or redrew anybody’s work; he was strictly hands off’. His classes were also very organised:
They were run pretty strictly and very sensibly for life classes — we’d have quick poses first, for 30 seconds or a minute, and then five minutes, and the last ones would be 15 or 20 minutes. He moved around the circle and helped people to see differently.
Sydney-based painter and sculptor Ann Thomson praised Molvig for his innate ability to bring out ‘what was distinct — what was best — about your work’:
I remember going and peeping into John Rigby’s art classes . . . It was Rigby who encouraged Molvig to come to Brisbane. And Rigby was a good teacher and a lovely man, but his students’ works all looked a bit like his. Not so with Jon Molvig!
Thomson also recounts that it was her bridesmaid’s dress, which she had collected from the dressmaker prior to a class, that sparked Molvig’s famous Bridesmaids series of paintings.
Only in his late teens, Peter Kennedy had preconceptions about Molvig before he attended his first class in 1964, having read ‘various things about him in the Courier Mail or Daily Telegraph’. However, a conversation with Brian Johnstone, of the renowned Johnstone Gallery in Bowen Hills, convinced Kennedy of Molvig’s considerable talents as an artist:
Brian picked up a small framed drawing by Molvig and said, ‘Look at the foreshortening on that arm’. It was a beautiful little pencil drawing, a wonderful representation of a body in some pose, and the lines were kind of fluid — intensely dark at certain points and then trailing off into something lighter and more lyrical. So I was very impressed, and the thing that immediately occurred to me was that I had never heard the term ‘foreshortening’ before. I looked at the arm and I immediately grasped what foreshortening was, and I thought, ‘I’d like to be able to foreshorten arms like that’.
According to Kennedy, Molvig emanated ‘a certain latent power — a strength and solidity’.
For others, Molvig was more than a teacher; he was a mentor and advocate, particularly for artist and teacher Mervyn Moriarty.
Jon was absolutely critical in my life . . . Molvig was an artist who cared about art and cared about people who were interested in art — and I was aware of him caring for me as a student. He was a fair bit older and extremely generous — he even went to Sydney with me, where he took me to meet lots of important people, including [art dealer] Rudy Komon, and he introduced me to art and galleries. I think perhaps that Molvig saw me as a younger brother, almost family.
Moriarty also credits Molvig with encouraging his critical eye as a young artist: ‘I became aware of toughening up in the way I looked at what I was doing, and being brutal about the choices I made’. While his life-drawing classes, for which Moriarty recalls paying just six shillings (the dollar superseded the pound in 1966), were not conventionally taught, he notes that Molvig ‘always made extremely good comments’, and left him feeling that he had learnt a lot.
Around 1960, Jon Molvig lived and worked at Corroboree House in Spring Hill, where his reputation as an artist grew among his peers. His wife, Cornelia (Otte) Bartzis, has described studio scenes akin to peak hour at Central Station: a procession of artists — Nevil Matthews, John Rigby, Joy Roggenkamp, Bronwyn Thomas, Gordon Shepherdson, John Aland, Milton Moon, John Perceval, Albert Tucker, Russell Drysdale and Charles Blackman, among others2 — would visit the studio to see the latest from a man known for his restless vision. However, according to Ann Thomson, even with this intense interest in his work, Molvig questioned his role as an Australian painter:
When Molvig talked about his art, he said he didn’t feel like an Australian painter. Yes, he painted Australian subjects, but his art came from another place. His wild style was very distinctive. There was such energy in the way he painted directly onto the hard Masonite, especially his expressionistic figures.
Striving to find a personal artistic language, Molvig created several significant series of works that were inspired by three trips to Central Australia, commencing in 1958. The ‘Centralian’ landscapes evoke the passion, lyrical emotion and painterly expressionism of the outback, while the ‘dead stockman’ works convey the age, and passing, of Aboriginal cultures. His ‘Eden industrial’ series records his recollections of Newcastle, the industrial city of his unhappy early years: blackened and degraded, his ‘garden’ is a barren place inhabited by an Adam and Eve exiled from the natural world. Finally, the ten ‘Tree of man’ paintings, which he completed in March 1968 while increasingly suffering ill health, represent Molvig’s final attempt to symbolise the major preoccupations of his work.
In addition to his unique and disquieting landscapes, the human figure was a recurring theme in Molvig’s practice — the portrait, in particular. Some of his most memorable paintings, tender and unnerving, depict women, madams and mad men, lovers and nudes. He painted two portraits of his artist friend Charles Blackman: the first, made in 1957, is held in the QAGOMA Collection. The second, painted in 1966, finally won him the coveted Archibald Prize, which he had entered numerous times. However, many critics affirmed that he deserved the accolade on many occasions prior to his last attempt.3 As critic James Gleeson wrote of Molvig’s work from 1955 to 1961:
No one in Australian art has painted so nakedly as Molvig did at that time. There was no covering to his emotions. He had torn away the last skin of reserve and painted the world he knew in his blood, his nerves and his heart. In a sense, it was orgiastic — a great Dionysian acceptance of those ecstatic storms that sometimes blow up from the subconscious with such violence that the government of reason is overwhelmed. Even the paint looks as if it has been blown on the canvas by tremendous gusts of passion.4
Sadly, just four years on from his Archibald win, Molvig’s career was cut short at the age of 46. His health had been an issue for years, as he suffered from nephritis as a child. Soon after his death, his friend, the poet and art critic Pamela Bell, paid tribute to Molvig’s quality of perception and power of expression:
With every new theme it seemed he began right at the beginning, almost to invent a fresh alphabet and a new language of forms, so acutely was he aware of the uniqueness of things and of the uniqueness of his response to each painterly challenge. What could appear as a diversity of styles to some of his critics was an awareness of this essence, the humility not to impose his own signature, but his willingness to abdicate to the organic expression and essential form of each experience.5
But perhaps the last word should be given over to long-time friend and biographer Betty Churcher from the last section of her book:
Because he has been so difficult to categorise, Molvig has often been overlooked by historians and curators . . . Yet, at the full stretch of his talent, he has produced images so powerful and urgent that they have that quality of all good art: they remain in the mind in all their original clarity.6
Esteemed by his peers, and with his works acquired by public galleries and private collectors around the country, Jon Molvig’s contribution to the Brisbane art community is immeasurable. ‘Maverick’ celebrates his unique contribution to the city’s cultural landscape.
Simon Elliott is Deputy Director, Collection and Exhibitions, QAGOMA.
The author thanks Michael Hawker (Curator, Australian Art, QAGOMA) and Rebecca Mutch (Editor, QAGOMA).
Endnotes 1 The quotes in this article from Pamela Wilson, Ann Thomson, Peter Kennedy and Mervyn Moriarty are from interviews conducted with the artists by Simon Elliott in Brisbane in April and May 2019. 2 Bruce Heiser, ‘Making a life with Jon Molvig: An interview with Otte Bartzis’, in Jon Molvig: Maverick [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2019, p.44. 3 Daniel Thomas was one such critic; see Betty Churcher, Molvig: The Lost Antipodean, Allen Lane, Ringwood, Vic., 1984, p.117. 4 James Gleeson, ‘What is the essential Molvig?’, Sun Herald [Sydney], 14 August 1966. 5 Pamela Bell, ‘Jon Molvig — an appreciation’, Art and Australia, September 1970, p.122. 6 Betty Churcher, Molvig: The Lost Antipodean, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1984, p.124.
Jon Molvig: Maverick explores Molvig’s contribution to the Brisbane art community, highlights his stylistic eclecticism, and revalues his unique contribution to art history. This richly illustrated, hardcover publication is available from the QAGOMA Store and online.
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art extends its gratitude to the Gordon Darling Foundation for its generous support of Jon Molvig: Maverick.
Featured image detail: Jon Molvig with James Finney 1960
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We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
