Museums, galleries and Biennale events often feature woven artworks and pieces that can be filed under the textile art label, so weaving can definitely be considered as art. Last week, then, we got the final confirmation about this truism when Glenda Nicholls won the Deadly Art Prize at the 2015 Victorian Indigenous Art Awards.
Nicholls won with her artwork entitled "A Woman's Rite of Passage", considered as "deeply spiritual" by the award judges and consisting in three life-size sculptural hand-woven jute string (a material that resembles bush twine) cloaks representing indigenous women and the role they play in Welcome to Country ceremonies.
Named the "Acknowledgment" (plain cloak), the "Elders'" (in a natural colour and with an emu feather fringe and mussel shell decoration) and the "Welcome" cloak (in scarlet red with token items and trinkets such as a sixpence and a padlocked chain to symbolise its concealed history), the pieces stand for the unspoken stories of the lives of Aboriginal women in the early settlements of Australia.
The original idea for the cloaks was quite different to the final result. As Nicholls stated in a press release: "I was going to call them 'A Rite of Passage to Country', (but) the collars didn't match up and something was telling me it was not quite right. It dawned on me that they were for women. The cloaks spoke to me - it was a spiritual connection."
Picked among 41 other finalists, Nicholls is the granddaughter of the late Sir Doug Nicholls, a talented AFL footballer and the first Aboriginal person to be knighted and appointed to vice-regal office as Governor of South Australia in the 1970s. She was taught to weave by her mother and grandmother. As a grandmother herself, she is now committed to passing on her skills and knowledge to the next generation, so her work also reflects the continuity of her family storyline.
Tapping into a growing interest in Indigenous art and culture, the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards was established ten years ago to raise the recognition of South-East Australian indigenous art, provide career opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists throughout Victoria, and establish links between art, culture and identity.
Other winners of the 2015 edition include Peter Waples-Crowe for "My Dingo Spirit, SOS: They Kill My Kin(d)" (Victorian Indigenous Art Award for Works on Paper), Troy Firebrace for "Galaxy Swirl" (Federation University Acquisitive Award for Work by a Victorian Regional Artist) and Brendan Kennedy for" Wangi Withinu Ngauwingi Walwa" (Australian Catholic University Acquisitive Award for Work Based on Spirituality and Cultural Tradition). Doncaster East artist Raymond Young, who started making art through a prisons community program, won instead the Victorian Indigenous Art Award for Three Dimensional Works with his series of ceramic shields entitled "From The Ground Up".
The awards have managed to raise the profiles of all the artists involved throughout the years and also attracted media attention to a wider variety of techniques and skills. Jenny Crompton won for example the 2014 Deadly Art Award with an intricate seaweed sculptural installation that impressed the judges for its delicate construction techniques.
The new work created by Nicholls - who in 2012 won both the Cal Award for Three Dimensional Works and the Koorie Jeritage Trust Acquisition Award for her woven piece "Ochre Net" - will hopefully raise more interest not just towards her practice, but also towards the art of weaving, while reminding us all that strong traditional values and knowledge can help us creating innovative works whilst maintaining cultural integrity.
Nicholls' exhibit is currently on display at the Art Gallery of Ballarat where all the finalists' works will be on show until 20 September 2015. Voting is instead open until 7th September for the $5,000 Creative Victoria People's Choice Award (which can be done at the Gallery or online).
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