arts and design

'Something magical': mother-daughter artist duo on reviving the lost art of weaving

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The first works you see as you come down the stairs into the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Tarnanthi exhibition – the gallery’s annual show of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art – are large cyanotype prints.

The edges of the deep blue cotton gently flutter, capturing a sense of the life of the ocean that surrounds North Stradbroke Island in Queensland. These prints, by Ngugi/Quandamooka artist Sonja Carmichael and her daughter, Elisa Jane Carmichael – who goes by the name Leecee – express the life of the island. The life in weaving, in shucked shells, in fallen leaves, in sharp white relief against the blue.

Developed in the 1840s, cyanotype is one of the earliest forms of photography. Objects, or negatives, are placed on paper coated with chemicals and then exposed to the sun; the chemicals would develop in the spaces touched by UV light. When developed, the final image is white negative space against a background of Prussian blue.

In the face of decades of stories of the Quandamooka people and their craft being told by information cards in anthropological collections, for the Carmichaels this process is a way of allowing their culture to speak for itself. The cyanotypes, says Leecee at the opening of Tarnanthi, capture the “process of the forms actually making their own mark on the fabric”.

Yagabili wunjayi (make today) by Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael.



Yagabili wunjayi (make today) by Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael. Photograph: Grant Hancock

This is the sixth year of Tarnanthi, bringing together contemporary work from First Nations artists across Australia. The size of the program fluctuates: every other year the festival takes over multiple galleries across Adelaide; in alternate years it is “focused” in the temporary exhibition space at AGSA, although the 2020 exhibition also includes an international offshoot in France.

Much of the work by the 87 artists this year was made in communities while they were under coronavirus lockdown. Despite this, there is a sense of freedom and joy to much of the work. Wawiriya Burton has made her first works on paper, where simple lines and circles in black paint capture the native plants of the APY lands. Naomi Hobson’s bright pops of colour against black and white photographs is loving and hilarious.

Along with cyanotype, the Carmichaels have also made dilly bags of ungaire (swamp reed), following a millennia-old tradition of weaving. Before European contact, Sonja says, these bags were essential to every aspect of daily life on the island. After invasion, the bags were taken and placed in museums across the world, the practice of making them was discouraged, and the knowledge of weaving was almost lost to the community.

Leecee held one of these bags at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. Bags from North Stradbroke Island have been identified in Scotland and Pittsburgh and the Smithsonian. Closer to home, there are some in the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, and it was there, alongside elders from the island, that Sonja studied the bags and taught herself to weave.

There was “something magical” in reviving the craft of looped weaving, says Sonja. “It’s more than the technique; it’s how we capture and reimagine [knowledge], go with the stories of our elders, and come together and sit with the bags.”

Wunjayi (today) by Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael.



Wunjayi (today) by Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael. Photograph: Grant Hancock

The Carmichaels had planned to start creating work together for Tarnanthi in March. Instead, as the country went into lockdown, they – like so many families – became separated. Leecee was at home in Brisbane, while Sonja was on the island.

It was a time of global tragedy coinciding with personal tragedy. Aunty Joan Hendriks, Sonja’s mother and a respected elder in the community, died in January. (Her name is used here with permission.) After the funeral and under the lockdown, Sonja says: “I just weaved and weaved and weaved.”

She points to an image in one of the cyanotypes. “You can see the diamond shape in our bag, in our gulayi (Quandamooka women’s bag)?” she asks. “That’s the diagonal knot.”

These diagonal knots are unique to weaving from North Stradbroke Island, and the knowledge of how to create them was stamped out under colonisation. It was during this time of processing her grief that Sonja “really got to understand” how this part of the traditional bags was formed, taking her observations of the bags at the university and putting this knowledge into practice.

“It is like this umbilical cord,” she describes. “It started to come together at last, because of that connection and time.”

Among Sonja’s mother’s items, the family found a certificate from Queensland’s chief protector of Aboriginals, giving Sonja’s great-grandmother permission to marry.

This document, as a physical representation of colonisation and trauma, brought out another level of grief in the family. Leecee’s response was to create art to capture who her great-great-grandmother was, rather than the name being held in this certificate, a woman who was under the control of the Queensland government.

One of the prints in the exhibition, named Bulgagu gara (come celebrate), was made for her: giving her the Quandamooka seafood feast she deserved. On the gallery wall, shells seem to tumble down towards the floor from a ghost net: food for a big marriage at the midden at Capembah Creek.

“We wanted to give her a celebration,” says Leecee. “It was quite an emotional piece.”

At the midden, alongside the flowing clear freshwater, says Sonja, “you can visualise the coming together. It’s where the grannies – even my grandmother – used to go.”

Wagari Djagun (carry country) by Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael.



Wagari Djagun (carry country) by Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael. Photograph: Grant Hancock

Just one of the four cyanotypes on display at Tarnanthi features text – words Leecee cut out of paper and pinned to the cotton so they could develop alongside the natural materials, the weaving and the ocean debris.

Mara mibul wunjayi, “hands alive today”, it reads, alongside budjong (mother), maran (aunty) and jadin (sister). It is a nod to the curatorial focus of Tarnanthi 2020 – Open Hands – but also to the strong matrilineal history Leecee and Sonja are following, rediscovering weaving techniques and reviving language, considering their ancestors and passing this on to the next generation.

When they originally received the commission, Leecee says they wanted to create something small. “I was worried about taking up too much space,” she says with a laugh. Instead, they have created hangings that take up whole gallery walls. “We cried when we saw this,” says Sonja.

This collection, says Sonja, captures the importance of “getting our weaving back, the memories. Acknowledging our ancestors and our artwork, and our aunties and our women’s business. Keeping it alive.”

Tarnanthi is showing at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 31 January 2021

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