PICTURES AND TEXT BY GEOFF VIVIAN
A needle-felted dog by Liz Marruffo
Perth artist Elizabeth Murruffo used the crowd funding utility Pozible to fund study trips to Florence and Mexico.
After missing out on a grant, she hit upon the idea of attracting orders for needle-felted portraits of people’s childhood pet dogs.
This story is published in the current edition of the Artsource newsletter.
TEXT BY GEOFF VIVIAN
This appeared as a catalogue essay for Paul Trinidad’s latest Bali exhibition. It also appears on his website here.
“… though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow….”
– Isaiah 1:18
Judgement and the vulnerable male are recurring themes in Paul Trinidad’s life and work.
He grew up in the Western Australian Goldfields towns of Kalgoorlie and Leonora. These communities began as temporary settlements for men who dug and scraped for gold. As deep mines replaced mine shafts dug by hand, male mine workers still vastly outnumbered women. The preponderance of single men in the Goldfields saw the state’s first Premier, John Forrest, reluctantly give women the vote rather than have his conservative government overturned by working men.
In his youth Trinidad spent several years in the wilderness, but not in harmony with nature. With his father and brother he worked a three-man gold mine at Lake Darlot. Together they pitted their minds and muscles against the hostile desert. They were pursuing a universal measure of men’s worth, extracted by toil and fire – gold. Continue reading
A serious cultural debate keeps popping up since Worora elder Donny Woolagoodja first displayed a giant Wanjina at the Sydney Olympics.
Vesna Tenodi
Several non-Aboriginal artists felt that Wanjina images, until then confined to Kimberley caves, were theirs to reproduce and re-interpret. Elders of the Worora, Ngarinjin and Wunambul tribes disagreed, and have expressed distress and disappointment at what they see as outsiders’ appropriation of their sacred imagery.
Dutch musician Randolph Smeets – aka the Phlod Nar – created a suite of musical pieces, even though he had never visited the Kimberley.
You can find my 2009 WA Today story about Randolph and his work here.
Croation-Australian gallery owner Vesna Tenodi had likewise never visited the people of Mowanjum. Nevertheless she commissioned a giant sculpture of Wanjinas carved in the side of a massive stone block, outside her gallery in Sydney’s Blue Mountains.
You can find my first KimberleyPage story about Vesna and her cultural adventure with the Wanjinas here. More stories about the unfolding drama are here.
TEXT BY GEOFF VIVIAN
Theona Councillor launched her second CD album last month and has since been promoting it in Perth and Hedland.
As many of her extended family members live in and around Geraldton I wrote this piece for the Midwest Times.
GEOFF VIVIAN
from The Western Review November 1994
Click on this image to read the story
There are several good reasons for avoiding opinion pieces.
One is the fact that opinions do change!
I wrote this in the mid-1990s before glassings came into vogue in Northbridge pubs.
Disclaimer: the author no-longer holds these views.
Well, some of them perhaps.
This was the first ever review of the play Bindjareb Pinjarra, which has since become a classic.
Click on this image to read the story
Kelton Pell, Geoff Kelso, Trevor Parfitt and Phil Thomson first performed their interactive play at The Actors’ Centre in Northbridge, Perth.
Actor and stage manager Craig Williams says the play is opening in Adelaide this coming week, before touring regional South Australia.
“Kelton Pell’s back in the cast, which now consists of Sam Longley, Isaac Drandic, Nigel Wilkes, and myself,” he says. “Last year I stage managed a short season, which included Geoff Kelso and Phil Thomson from the original cast. (Phil and Geoff not available for this tour. Shorty Parfitt is sadly no longer with us.) The show has been continuing with various combinations of casts, and that loosely improvised script, for almost 20 years, touring all over Australia, and is still just as well received everywhere. Looking forward to being in the cast this time. If you’re in SA, hope you get to see it!”
TEXT BY GEOFF VIVIAN
from Artseen May 2000
I have just found something I wrote in 2000, as part of a review of an exhibition by Albany artist Shaaron du Bignon:
“… much post-modern art becomes the willing tool of the mighty. To give one example, Rupert Murdoch was able to set up his Sky-TV channels using almost unlimited free material from MTV video makers. The fact that they borrowed heavily on performance art, itself a derivative of Dada, is rarely mentioned. Dada was all about deconstructing authority. Its grand daughter, MTV, has become an unwitting and foolish accessory to unmitigated power.”
I must have been an opinionated art critic! To read more go to Judith McGrath’s Artseen or click below.
TEXT AND PORTRAIT BY GEOFF VIVIAN
from Artsource April – June 2013
Pierre Capponi is eyeing off a stack of ornate pressed tin sheets that once lined a room in
Pierre Capponi
an old house. The century-old building material is the main sculptural medium he uses to create life-sized figurative works that evoke Goldfields ghost towns, rural rubbish tips and desiccated mammals you sometimes find on dusty outback roadsides.
In his early teens he migrated here from Marseilles with his family, and pressed tin features in his earliest Australian memories.
“We lived in Smith Street in Highgate,” he says. “My father was reading the racing form guide one morning and there was a shadow of him on the pressed tin wall. I always thought that was a beautiful moment. Continue reading
TEXT BY GEOFF VIVIAN
from The Koori Mail
Ernie Bridge passed away late last month at age 76, suffering from asbestos-related diseases. He launched legal action in WA’s Supreme Court on 15 March for damages connected with the asbestosis and mesothelioma he contracted during his many visits to the former mining town of Wittenoom.
Mr Bridge was best known as a country and western singer and the WA parliament’s first Aboriginal member. He was also believed to be the first Aboriginal cabinet minister in any Australian government.
But as with all people, there was much more to the man. Continue reading