Thea Anamara Perkins’, Arrernte/Kalkadoon peoples, paintings are imbued with strength, warmth and quiet determination. Family members and the artist’s Arrernte homeland are recurring subjects, often drawn from Perkin’s familial archives that include prominent fighters for social justice and First Peoples’ rights. An early career artist, Perkins has exhibited since 2018, and her paintings are held in numerous public collections including the National Portrait Gallery. Perkins’ work is featured in the 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial: After the Rain, which opens at the National Gallery of Australia in December.
Tony Albert: Today I am recording from Ngunnawal Country on which the National Gallery of Australia stands. I pay respect to the people who have cared for this country from time immemorial to forever. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and the next generation of young leaders who continue to carry the flame of our ancestors.
I also acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which you are listening and pay my respect for the many outstanding contributions they have made to the life of this nation. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are respectfully advised that this recording may contain references to deceased people, where possible permission has been sought to include their names.
Thea Anamara Perkins: You know, that idea of like the tortured artist and Van Gogh is that you could actually take your pain but be quite incisive with how you articulate it and kind of be in charge of it. So I think that this work is a really beautiful example, trying to articulate what it meant to be an urban Aboriginal person.
Jennifer Higgie: Artists’ Artists is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I'm Jennifer Higgie and over the course of this series I'll be talking with artists about works of art from the national collection that inspire, move, or intrigue them. This season I'll be speaking to artists whose work is featured in After the Rain, the 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial, which opens at the National Gallery in December.
Born in 1992, Thea Anamara Perkins is an Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist who lives on Gadigal country in Sydney. Often working from her family's photographic archives. The subjects of her paintings are her Country, her friends and family, many of whom have been and are advocates for social justice and First People's rights. Her late grandfather was the activist Charles Perkins. Her mother is the curator, Hetti Perkins and the acclaimed film director Rachel Perkins is her aunt. Welcome, Thea.
Thea Anamara Perkins: Thank you for having me here. And I just want to acknowledge the Gadigal people on whose Land I'm speaking from today and acknowledge Elders past and present.
Jennifer Higgie: It's really lovely to talk to you. Could you talk a little bit about what you've got planned for After the Rain?
Thea Anamara Perkins: For this show the concept of After the Rain was a really interesting kind of guiding principle when it came to drawing on works from my archive and bringing together my portrait and landscape practices.
They've been two quite distinct threads, so it's been a really interesting process bringing them together, but also upscaling them and for me, the thing that has really stuck about it is this idea of perseverance and coming through difficulties, much like that sense of joy and celebration that you get after the rain. It's this idea of what kind of pushes people to go on and persevere. So it's been about honing into those moments of joy, I think.
Jennifer Higgie: It's both a beautiful metaphor, the idea of after the rain about regeneration and renewal, but it's also quite a literal feeling. We all know what it's like in Australia when it rains and there’s been maybe a drought for a long time and the rain comes and there's a wonderful sense of relief, I guess.
Thea Anamara Perkins: Yeah, totally. And I think being an Arrernte person and a desert person, you know, that idea of rain can be a relief, but then also something quite treacherous in the sense that big rains push the water through Country and when the river flows, it can be a very kind of dangerous event.
Jennifer Higgie: And so how did this idea of After the Rain help shape the work that you're coming up with?
Thea Anamara Perkins: Grouping the works together is really interesting in the sense that it kind of, it's analogous to, you know, looking through a photo album. And it was very important for me to come across this term that's used in psychology, a ‘glimmer’, which is instances of safety and belonging. Like it's the opposite of a trigger point.
And I thought that it was really important to express that, especially in the face of intense misrepresentation and misinformation about Aboriginal people I saw, you know, in the media and just generally growing up and a lot of that prejudice. For me, my family images directly refuted that.
Jennifer Higgie: The portraits that you'll be including in the show, will they all be from your family album? They'll all be relatives of yours?
Thea Anamara Perkins: Yeah. I like to draw from my family because I like to talk about what I know and my own experiences.
Jennifer Higgie: I'd love to sort of go back a bit now and talk to you about how did you become an artist?
Thea Anamara Perkins: So I've always drawn, ever since I was very young, and I think it's always been my natural way of expressing myself, I think, and if I was having any difficulties, you know, I'd often reconcile them through that process. I was also very fortunate because my mum, Hetti, is a curator, so from a young age I grew up with a lot of artists and curators and you know, many wonderful people in the arts around us.
Jennifer Higgie: Where did you go to art school and what was that experience like for you?
Thea Anamara Perkins: I went to the College of Fine Arts in Sydney. I didn't finish. I got most of the way through, and then I realised it wasn't for me. And I think having to kind of formulate things in advance and have a clear idea of, you know, what the artwork was going to be, didn't suit me because it was often in the process that I understood what I was trying to talk about, and I'd have these, you know, these really strong compulsions and wasn't able to justify them in advance, and I think I did get some really great fundamentals, but I just wanted to get out there and start practicing.
Jennifer Higgie: When you go to a museum or a gallery and you're looking at exhibitions or you're looking at collections, what do you think it is that you're looking for in a work of art that you find inspiring or that captivates you or challenges you?
Thea Anamara Perkins: I am really fascinated to see works that not only have a good idea, but are also realised well. Being kind of a painting nerd, I just like to see really, you know, beautiful technique.
Jennifer Higgie: And when you were in the studio, what's your process? How do you begin making a work of art?
Thea Anamara Perkins: I'd say that portrait and landscape veins are quite different, but with the portrait practice, I'll work with one-to-one reproductions of the images and it can be a millimeter of difference that throws an image off. It's been likened to the focus of a camera where the faces will be in sharp relief and everything, the extraneous details kind of softer and my studio itself is quite spartan in the sense that aside from music, there'll be no distractions. You know, no piles of books or anything like that. It's a workspace, and having that space to focus is really important.
Jennifer Higgie: Well, it might be a good moment now to go onto your first choice of your selections from the National Gallery.
Gordon Bennett's intaglio print Poet from 1993 is a key work by the Birri Gubba and Darumbal artist who is widely recognised for his critical engagement with identity history and the power of visual language. Born in 1955, Bennett, who died in 2014, mined both Australian history and Aboriginal identity with a fierce intelligence and imagination.
In 1994, he wrote, ‘if I were to choose a single word to describe my art practice, it would be the word question. If I were to choose a single word to describe my underlying drive, it would be freedom. To be free, we must be able to question the ways our own history defines us.’ Would you be able to describe what it looks like?
Thea Anamara Perkins: So this is a beautiful work that depicts an Aboriginal figure dipping their hand into a river, towards a target, on a field of dots. And I'm really interested in Gordon Bennett's manifesto. In it, he talks about a person that seeks their identity and they find themselves reflected in a river and it places them in a panorama or of a continuum of past, present, and future.
And I think that's how he saw Aboriginal people. It's kind of like he saw identity as your position within your context, and in this way, uses, I think the target is a kind of locus or point that situates you in that identity, and then representation is something that's constructed around that.
Jennifer Higgie: What was it about this work that inspires or intrigues you?
Thea Anamara Perkins: You know, that idea of like the tortured artist and Van Gogh is that you could actually take your pain but be quite incisive with how you articulate it and kind of be in charge of it. So I think that this work is a really beautiful example, trying to articulate what it meant to be an urban Aboriginal person.
Jennifer Higgie: It's a very ambiguous image in a way, isn't it? It's very enigmatic because the title of the work is Poet. What do you think he's saying with all of these different elements?
Thea Anamara Perkins: So I think that the dots for him have a lot of symbolism because it's this kind of Western idea where it's a grid or mechanical reproduction, or the Aboriginal sense where it's this unifying field and somewhat infinite, which is beautiful when you liken it to this idea of the river and the continuum. And I think to express an Aboriginal figure as a poet is really interesting 'cause it's someone of intellect and sensitivity interpreting the word so, it really challenges that hierarchical language in Western art.
Jennifer Higgie: We're going to move on now to your second choice.
The late Michael Riley Sacrifice series from the early 1990s marked the Wiradjuri Kamilaroi artist and filmmaker's first foray into conceptual photography. Exploring the impact of Christianity and mission life on Aboriginal people, the series consists of 15 black and white images in Untitled [palms with stigmata], Riley, who was born in 1960 and died in 2004 employs the Christian symbol of stigmata to reflect on the history of missions, the suppression of language and ceremony and the personal and collective cost of colonisation. So what are we seeing in this image, Thea?
Thea Anamara Perkins: So in this image you see two hands, Aboriginal hands with stigmata, and it's always really captured me the gentleness of the way that the hands are placed onto a surface.
If you think about those hierarchies in Western art, a really beautiful and gentle subversion is putting Aboriginal bodies in the sense of hands into this Christian symbology is really powerful, the implications of that spirituality and Christianity and mission life. And also the horrific effects of the introduction of alcohol and drugs and so on.
So I think that Riley finds a really beautiful way of negotiating really difficult history and articulating it in a really sensitive, beautiful way that speaks to the viewer.
Jennifer Higgie: There's something saint-like about this portrait in a way.
Thea Anamara Perkins: I think it's very significant to put our suffering into the realm of the crucifixion, you know, and brings in all of those scenes of sacrifice and alludes to the strangeness and alienness of that symbology that was imposed on Aboriginal people. And that's a running theme in his work.
Jennifer Higgie: So now we'll move on to your third and fourth choices, which are two remarkable works by the same artist.
One of the most significant Australian artists of the twentieth century, Emily Kam Kngwarray was a senior Anmatyerr woman and a founding member of the Utopia Women's Batik Group. Born in 1910 and who died in 1996, didn't really begin making art until she was in her seventies, and then batiks and paintings poured from her. Untitled (Alhalker) 1992 is a mythic and lyrical mapping of Country. Alhalker, the desert country of Kngwarray's birth is anchored by a sacred rock in the form of a spectacular arched monolith and shaped by the vagaries of the harsh desert environment. Thea, could you describe this work for our listeners?
Thea Anamara Perkins: It certainly is a monumental work.I think this work in particular is in reference to the wild flowers in central Australia when they're all in bloom. It really is something to be seen, and the shimmering color and movement and energy that's really captivating, but it also creates this kind of macro, micro sense where it could be this like an aerial perspective or honing into the detail of leaves and all the knowledge is codified in that and it creates this kind of interesting perspectiveless place and this idea of the world is infinite. And something that Bennett spoke about was this idea of Western perspective and its difference to Aboriginal belief systems and the kind of Western perspective being something that places the individual at the centre and it's a kind of construction where the individual is in the centre and then all of the objects are arranged around that individual in a grid. While in Aboriginal art, you have another way of viewing it where the self is a part of everythingness.
Jennifer Higgie: It's such a deliriously beautiful painting. It's so atmospheric. The gradation of the colours in it, it's evoking Country. It's also evoking a kind of almost musicality, I think. And I think it's really fascinating too, the way that she made her paintings that they were laying out on the ground and she sat on the canvas and painted around her and so there's one idea that they're not really a representation of Country, they're more like they are Country. She's creating Country around her and of course, Country was everything to this artist and she said that in a way her painting was a way of expressing to the world the importance of Country.
Thea Anamara Perkins: I think they definitely have that kind of haptic quality and they're rhythmic because you know, they're informed by an oral tradition, you know, the women singing and that rhythmic kind of reiterative process.
Jennifer Higgie: So the second work by the great Kngwarray, it's not titled this one, but it looks quite different. In the late 1970s Kngwarray learned the technique of batik dyeing and in 1978 participated in the establishment of the Utopia Women's Batik Group. The summer of 1989 saw many of the women artists begin to paint on canvas. For Kngwarray with decades of experience creating ceremonial body and ground designs, that transition from silk batik to acrylic painting on canvas was seamless. Nonetheless, her batiks, such as this example on cotton from 1981 is one of her earliest works, and it carries the lexicon of marks and designs that the artist was to employ through the various stages of her development as a painter. Could you describe this work for our listeners?
Thea Anamara Perkins: Yes, so it's a little tricky to describe this one, but there's a lot of energetic intersecting lines and dots and desert colours in deep reds, browns, oranges, contrasted with really bright yellows and whites.
Jennifer Higgie: What do you think she's learning or expressing in batik that then was communicated in paint? What do you see as that sort of journey for her as an artist?
Thea Anamara Perkins: Yeah, I feel like the batiks in the past may have been dismissed as kind of crafts. It's more recently that their significance has been appreciated and really at the beginning of the Central Desert movement and hugely significant.
Jennifer Higgie: And it's wonderful to think of this work too, being made communally in a way. It was a group of women who were all making their work together and there's a wonderful sense of both community and joy, I think, in the work. But there's also the extraordinary way that Kngwarray came to become an artist that it wasn't until she was in her seventies and you know, she had done so many things in her life, she'd been a camelier and she'd obviously been a very important part of her community. It was almost as if she sat down to make art and she was immediately a great master artist. You know, she was an extraordinary artist right from the get go. How do you explain that? How does someone become so brilliant immediately like that?
Thea Anamara Perkins: I think that having a wealth of life experience, but then also very deep knowledge, make this really amazing fluency, confidence and stridency.
Jennifer Higgie: Thea, I've really loved talking with you today, so thank you so much for joining us and I can't wait to see your work in After the Rain.
Thea Anamara Perkins: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's been lovely to talk.
Jennifer Higgie: I am Jennifer Higgie, and this has been Artists’ Artists brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. Information about the works of art discussed in this episode can be found in the episode show notes. You can subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app or listen at nga.gov.au.
