Yesterday we enjoyed some time with Curtis Taylor, whose short films appear in the wonderful Yiwarra Kuju (One Road) multi-touch table. Curtis is from Martu country, the western region of the stock route. Below are notes from some of the team about the visit.
Lit by the table, from left: Susannah (behind), Linda, Curtis, Deb (with antlers), Trish, Jess, Ben and Dawn
TRISH: A heartfelt thanks to Curtis for sharing his background knowledge of the exhibition content, and his passion to create new media to tell old stories. Especially interesting was hearing about his own discipline to succeed at film-making, and his concern and commitment for communities to have access to all the new materials, particularly school students.
I liked hearing about the challenges Curtis faced on-the-ground to produce the re-enactment of the Seven Sisters story, and winning the approval from his Elders. His enthusiasm is infectious and his humility is to be admired.
CATH: However stunning the exhibition is (as in good and but also confronting), listening to Curtis added new dimensions to my experience of it. In some ways it was simple things like learning that ‘yiwarra kuju’ (‘one road’) is a term common to all the language groups of the stock route. But what I most appreciated is less tangible. It just felt good to glean a smidge about Martu country and people not only from the gorgeous paintings, fine baskets and rich multimedia but from a real, live – and very cluey – human!
DAWN: It was wonderful yesterday listening to Curtis talk so passionately about his people and his country as well as the processes involved in creating his films for the touch-screen.
Since the opening of the exhibition I have been fascinated by a particular painting called Paruku, painted by a group of artists: Veronica Lulu, Bessie Doonday, Anna Johns, Wendy Wise, Shirley Brown, Charnia Samuals, Lyn Mason, Daisy Kungah and Kim Mahood. It depicts two maps superimposed over each other, a traditional dot painting map and a detailed western topographic map of the Paruku Indigenous Protected Area which is now managed by the traditional owners. While I could read and understand the Western map, Curtis was able to interpret the intricate dot map for me. The traditional map of Paruka with fields of dots shows the rich plant food and medicinal resources as well as the traditional burning of the land, a practices which is still employed today by the traditional owners to maintain the vitality of the land.
Today I also had the pleasure of watching Curtis tell stories to a group of visiting Year 1/2 students from Harrison Primary School in Canberra. The students had their eyes firmly focused on Curtis and were listening intently to his stories. This added an unexpected dimension to their visit to the exhibition and added to their interest. Curtis also enjoyed watching the kids having fun killing ants, catching thorny devils, drawing their own pictures and generally having fun on the touch-screen.
Thank you Curtis for your great contribution to the exhibition, to furthering our understandings of the exhibition and for helping the kids today to have fun.
The Yiwarra Kuju exhibition came alive listening to Curtis talk about his country and family. As Cath mentioned, it was the simple things that furthered my understanding of the stories and paintings as well as the details within the exhibition itself. For example the opportunity for visitors to draw in the sand on the multi-touch table isn’t just something really fun to do, but a method Aboriginal families use to tell stories from one generation to the next.
Curtis thank you for sharing your story with us. Thank you for helping me understand that the paintings in Yiwarra Kuju are not just about the experiences and contact with the Canning Stock Route, but about home, country, history and family.
I’d also like to send my thanks to Curtis. It was an enriching experience – just wandering (it seemed…) and talking about his work and the work of the FORM team, community members/artists and the art centres involved in putting Yiwarra Kuju together.
Being a process-oriented I found it wonderful to listen to ‘how it happened’ stories. Curtis’ personal perspective conjoured images of all the different activities of all the people – artists, curators, adminitsrators etc, etc – who put together the exhibition. And just thinking about that amount and diversity of activity and involvement made my head as full of amazement and wonder as it was full of the startling colours of the Yiwarra Kuju exhibition!
I love that the multi media touch screen operates in a modern format of the “old ways” – i.e. drawing in the sand. It seemed Curtis was drawing connections for us every time we moved to a new part of the exhibition.
And I learned that Maduwongga (sp?) – a new language – emerged when 8 different language groups came together after being displaced by the creation and use of the stock route.