The Art Gallery of WA has reopened to the public after a large multimillion dollar refurbishment. The Galley is celebrating the opening by launching it’s largest-ever exhibition of West Australian art featuring 230 artists and 361 artworks including 111 new works commissioned for this project.
‘The View From Here’ is the name of the exhibition and is free for all to see it at the Art Gallery in the Perth Cultural Centre. A centrepiece of the exhibition will be ‘Collective Ground’ which will present some 60 works from Aboriginal Art Centres and Aboriginal artists across WA.
Mark Patrick spoke with Gueat Curator of ‘Collective Ground’, Tui Raven on the Breakfast Show.
The pandemic has forced us to consider the way we live and how. Many of us have had to adjust from being in wide-open spaces to being contained in small spaces. It has been a time to reflect on the places we occupy, and the spaces we inhabit, internally and externally. Collective Ground asks the viewer to consider the ground on which they walk.
Yamaji/Noongar curator Tui Raven has brought together Collective Ground — the first exhibition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander works acquired through AGWA’s COVID-19 stimulus package. It explores deep time and the stories that flow through the land on which we all live — as told through the artworks of First Nations peoples across the state.
The works in Collective Ground have been curated in consideration of the need to separate some of the works based on subject matter related to men’s and women’s Tjukurba/Tjukurpa (the creation period when ancestor beings created the world). During the Tjukurba ancestral beings left marks on the landscape and this laid out Songlines or Creation Lines. The word Tjukurba was chosen as it is from languages of the Western and Central Desert regions of Australia. Many works in Collective Ground relate to the Tjukurba of these regions. The word for the Dreaming or creation time in Noongar language is Nyitting