HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

HELEN S. TIERNAN MEMORY SPACE

COOEE ART REDFERN | 17 APRIL - 8 MAY 2021 1

SOLO EXHIBITION HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE 17 April - 8 May 2021 OFFICIAL OPENING | Saturday 17 April, 2-4pm This catalogue is dedicated to a very special elder, Ivy - my mum, who passed recently at the age of 100, then to welcome my first grandchild Jack Henry... AKNOWLEDGEMENTS Margo Neale, Marie Geissler, Lynne Kelly, Alison Page, Paul Frish, Robin Errie, B. Pasco, Bill Gammage INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES AND SITES REFRENCED Dharug Dharawal, Gundungurra, Guringai and Gweagle peoples from the Sydney and costal area. Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri, Wathaurong, Kulin Nation, Wai Worung and Gunai Kunai peoples of Victoria. The Tjampi Weavers, APY Lands.

COOEE ART | EMILY KNGWARREYE

COOEE ART REDFERN

Introduction Adj. Professor Margo Neale

Head: Centre for Indigenous Knowledges, National Museum of Australia Senior Indigenous Curator National Museum of Australia Helen S. Tiernan uses her art like an archaeological tool, to interrogate, challenge and explore the many layers and contradictions that lie below the surface of contact history.

Estate on Earth - How Aborigines Made Australia.The paintings, like the book, explored the contrasting ways our ancient continent has been viewed and ‘managed’ by colonisers and First Australians.

From her earliest years at Canberra School of art, Helen’s interest lay in narrative, historical, satirical, and romantic art. She began by using the embossed and relief patterning found in decorative interiors, employing wallpaper as a metaphor in validating and acknowledging the historical female domestic experience, including the claustrophobia and repressive control that creative women experienced within the confines of their homes and family and extrapolated this to Aboriginal women in servitude.

By 2017, Helen had turned her attention to the theme of first contact in the antipodes, drawing upon material that documented the process of ‘transculturation’, during the 235 years since Australia colonisation. Her richly research-based art mined both European and Indigenous archival records from the colonial art of Joseph Lycett to Tupia (James Cook’s Polynesian navigator) to the imagery of William Barak and Tommy McRae. Her works were alive with contemporaneous references to the writing of Paul Irish Hidden in Plain View, Bruce Pasco Dark Emu, Bill Gammage The Greatest Estate on Earth, and art historian Ian McLean, revealing the intimate knowledge of, and deep connection to, Country.

In 2014, Tiernan presented Farming Without Fences, her first solo exhibition at COOEE ART. The exhibition was profoundly influenced by Bill Gammage’s ground-breaking book, The Biggest

The exhibition, Transculturation - Sublime & Surreal Encounters of First Encounters in the Antipodes, featured three major works about Cook’s adventures in the Pacific and the role played by his Polynesian navigator Tupia. All three were acquired by the National Maritime Museum.

In this exhibition Tiernan’s landscapes are cultured spaces, repositories of ancient knowledge and deep memory. They are storied with Songlines and Tjukurrpa and inflected with the moralities arising from mythology that reminds us of how values and identities are formed. By re-digesting and transforming history through her own creative process Helen S. Tiernan challenges us to revisit and re-interpret it. Her works present us with Songlines that are richly multi-layered post-contemporary insights into what it means to be a truly cognisant Australian.

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

In this latest exhibition, Helen S. Tiernan has been inspired by the ground-breaking international touring exhibition Songlines - tracking the seven sisters for which I was lead curator. Foremost amongst a number of other influences have been The Memory Code, written by Lynne Kelly, thus the exhibition title, and Alison Page’s Clever Country.

Snakes and Ladders (detail panel 3) | 2021 oil on canvas | 180 x 330 cm (3 panels 180 x 110 cm each) | #19031

Memory Space

Helen Tiernan is an artist of considerable eloquence, technical virtuosity, humour and academic enquiry. Born in Gippsland, Victoria of Aboriginal and Irish descent, , the principal creative focus in her art has been to interrogate, challenge and explore the many contradictions that lie below the surface of cross-cultural interactions. In this, her third solo exhibition with Cooee Art, she draws on both Indigenous and non-indigenous knowledge, storytelling, and history, to point out that landscapes are cultured spaces, deeply informed by the impacts of ancient knowledge and history. They are laden with deep memory, identity, and value. Dismissing perspectives that focus solely on violent encounters, she looks to more nuanced accounts, and refers to more sympathetic interactions. In paintings that reveal layered histories of interconnected peoples, species, events and places she proposes new ways of understanding them.

Tiernan’s work is informed by archival research and oral history as well as the thinking of contemporary theorists. She looks to records of Indigenous colonial culture and Indigenous data revealed in colonial art from artists such as Joseph Lycett, William Hodges and Conrad Martin, Tupia (James Cook’s Polynesian navigator), and post-contact colonial Indigenous artists William Barak, Tommy McRae, and Mickey of Ulladulla, who were concerned to keep cultural memory alive. She draws on the contemporary writing of Paul Irish Hidden in Plain View, Bruce Pasco Dark Emu, Bill Gammage The Greatest Estate on Earth - How Aborigines Made Australia, Ray Norris Astronomical Symbolism in Australian Rock Art, as well as the esteemed anthropologist Howard Morphy’s, Becoming Art. Exploring Cross-Cultural Perspectives, and art historian Ian McLean’s Rattling Spears. A History of Indigenous Australian Art, in proposing a history of survival through innovation, intimate knowledge and deep connection to Country. More recently, Tiernan has been inspired by Lynne Kelly’s Memory Code,

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Dr. Marie Geissler

Alison Page’s Clever Country, and Margo Neale’s exhibition Songlines tracking the seven sisters at the National Museum of Australia. In her monumental work Snakes and Ladders (180 x 330 cm), Tiernan references the Seven Sisters Dreaming, by painting the flying woven Tjanpi scuptures, especially commissioned by the National Museum of Australia for its international touring Songlines exhibition. She also quotes the exhibition’s writhing Mulga wood snakes, which like Rainbow Serpents allude to winding waterways, the internet and the algorithms of the digital age, all symbols of intercultural connection. There is also a reference to the Seven Sisters constellation rock art showcased in the Songlines. She paints these star images on standing stones, which refer to their use as traditional cultural instruments of astronomy, but also to the ‘memory places’ that Kelley quotes in her book. A more contemporary gesture and a nod to the popular practice of graffiti is there, not by using her own handprint as was the custom of old for Indigenous rock art, painting but by using her surname … Tiernan. Juxtaposed within the latter Indigenous perspectives is a reference to a European morality tale, an old Indian game adapted into a 19th century Victorian version of Snakes and Ladders, in which players climbed ladders of ‘knowledge’ or descended snakes into ‘darkness’. In this way, impressionable children learned of the unpredictably of life with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes, simply a matter of chance. Bringing both perspectives together and looking to both the past and future indigenous and non-Indigenous cross-cultural histories she launches a rocket from the corner of the painting, bringing into focus the implications of the Space Race and in particular, the 2021 Mars landings by the USA, and Indigenous narratives that have traditionally linked them to the cosmos.

In other works, Tiernan reflects on the similarities in the experience of Indigenous and nonIndigenous Australians during colonisation that enabled them to co-exist, and mutually benefit. These enabled Aboriginal people to survive, share in, and engage with the newcomers on their own cultural terms. Her monumental three-panelled work Fish out of water - Cultural Collision, (180 x 330 cm) exemplifies this type of encounter in a subtle, sophisticated way. Here in her surrealist evocation of landscape, the sense of a palpable Dreaming reality, is exemplified by the haptic impact of the painted surface, in which patterns of ceremonial body markings are overlaid upon the image. In this three-panel work, the left panel peers into the distant view of boathouses and wharves perched over the river, as a paddle steamer laden with recently felled logs glides slowly by. On the far right, the original inhabitants live on the edges of the Murray River, seemingly suspended in a parallel reality – a time warp in which they are still the sole human inhabitants of their world. The parched landscape, bloodied by an intense red haze, and the writhing spirit-forms of fish, suspended high into the tree canopy of the riverside gums, alludes to the nation-wide destruction of forests and wildlife by fire and ignorance of traditional Indigenous land and resource management. In the central panel Tiernan references Eliza Fraser, who was painted by Sidney Nolan c.1962/4 and, on the river bend, an image of Nolan’s own emblematic anti-hero, Ned Kelly. Tiernan’s focus is the cross-cultural dynamic that drove the late 19th century mythology of her own Kulin people of the Gippsland region in Victoria. It evolved to explain the disappearance of the ‘white woman of Gippsland’ from the shipwrecked Britannia in 1841 and how, based on unsubstantiated evidence, it implicated the Indigenous peoples for the

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Fish out of Water - Cultural Collisions (panel 2) | 2020 oil on canvas | 180 x 330 cm (3 panels 180 x 110 cm each) | #18731

woman’s capture and disappearance. This was, in fact, discovered to be false years after the incident, when the Kulin people returned a carved bust of ‘the woman’ that was the original figurehead of the ship Britannia to the then Commissioner of the area, Commissioner Tyres. In reference to this story, Tiernan has painted a glowing white woman perched in a tree above. Below she includes Aboriginal people at camp, who are symbolically referenced as the perpetrators.

ghostly outlines of three large Aboriginal shields. They hover in the sky over the ship, like sentinels or Ancestral Spirits, while their encoding flags the importance of ancient Indigenous astronomy. Etched into the surface is a reference to the Victorian Carrisbrook stone arrangements and Bora(ceremonial) rings.The shields appear to align with the cardinal points, the axis points are within a few degrees of due north and due east and are inscribed with the letters ‘N and E’ to mark this.

That traditional lives continued almost undisturbed in remote areas during the colonial years, is also taken up inTiernan’s paintings of Aboriginal peoples fishing in the sea and along inland waterways. In paintings such as Holding the Land (170 x 110 cm), and Songlines - Living to Fish I (170 x 110 cm) she elaborates on this, documenting the presence of Aborigines as canoeists, fisherman and hunters, at one in the bush, prompting speculation, that the pristine arcadia of the Australian continent during the years of settlement were living evidence of the benefits of the holistic environmental regimes of ancient Law in action. Her use of gold here takes up this by symbolically referencing at once to the preciousness of the landscape and water to Indigenous Australians, but also from a European view, its value as a commodity of capitalist trade and development.

Another articulation in Tiernan’s cross-cultural narratives, is the interweaving of symbolic references to instruments and vehicles of navigation, the subject of paintings from her earlier exhibitions, that highlighted that technologies of innovation existed for both cultures. She inhabits her paintings variously to elaborate on this context using sailing ships, canoes with mobile kitchens, paddle steamers and boats, as the vehicles of transportation and stone walled fish traps and spears as tools of technology that supported efficient food harvest. The technology of navigation is referenced by quoting variously to cardinal points on the map, nautical navigational charts, star configurations, rock art, Songlines and scar tree carvings.

Two Worlds (100 x 100 cm), is another work of symbolic early Black-White intercultural encounter. Here, in close focus, a standing man paddles his canoe across calm waters towards a large three-masted sailing ship anchored in the bay. His wife tends to a smoking on-board oven. There is an innocence and dream-like quality to the encounter supported by the attitude of the family, its warm golden palette, and all-over imprint of the Aboriginal chevron design. The encounter is spiritually charged due to the presence of the

On a personal level, Tiernan’s paintings mine her family memory and her recollections of growing up near the waters and coasts in eastern Victoria, as well as learned knowledge of the history and imagery of colonial inland river exploration. Her immaculately detailed landscapes are richly multilayered networks of intersecting histories. They present as metaphors for Songlines of Country and the complex webs of spiritual and historic connection that link the lives of the peoples and places that sustained both Australia’s Indigenous and European communities and culture.

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

As Above So Below with Songlines | 2020 oil on canvas | 150 x 90 cm | #18732

In this monumental three panelled work, Tiernan references the rainbow serpent. Simultaneously, she introduces a European morality tale through reference to the famous board game. Snakes and Ladders, a 19th century Victorian adaption of an old Indian board game, teaches impressionable young players the unpredictability of life. Further, the game symbolises the random occurrence of good and bad with the help of Ladders, representing an ascent to knowledge, and Snakes, forming a slide into darkness.

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Snakes and Ladders | 2021 | oil on canvas 180 x 330 cm (3 panels 180 x 110 cm each) | #19031

Kamay - Songcircles | 2020 oil on canvas | 106 x 106 cm | #18854

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Two Worlds With Bora Circles | 2020 oil on canvas | 100 x 100 cm | #18855

Tupias Sketches - Kamay | 2020 oil on canvas | 60 x 159 cm | #18856

Focusing on Indigenous survival on the waterways of Eastern Australia, Tiernan reflects on their navigational and settlement histories presenting a strong and dignified people that found a place for themselves in the new reality of European occupation. Despite the adverse circumstances that they encountered, their cultural practice remained largely intact.

Eora Family Fishing in Wooden Boats with Catch | 2021 oil, paper on canvas | 40 x 30 cm | #19016

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Eora Family Fishing in Wooden Boats | 2020 oil, paper on canvas | 41 x 30 cm | #18861

Holding the Land | 2020 oil on canvas | 170 x 109 cm | #18853

Using an evocative panoramic landscape format, where images, lines, and symbols are used to encode traditional knowledge and storytelling in abstract and conceptual ways, the artist interweaves charming vignettes of traditional life, paying homage to such practices that were upheld well into the 19th century.

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Holding the Land (detdail) | 2020 oil on canvas | 170 x 109 cm | #18853

Fish out of Water - Cultural Collisions | 2020 oil on canvas | 180 x 330 cm (3 panels 180 x 110 cm each) | #18731

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Scar Trees - From the Bank | 2020 encaustic, oil on canvas | 45 x 30 cm | #18857

Scar Trees - Site Specific | 2020 encaustic, oil on canvas | 45 x 30 cm | #18858

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Scar Trees - Journey Lines | 2020 encaustic, oil on canvas | 45 x 30 cm | #18860

Ancient History Written in the Trees on the Murray | 2020 oil, paper on canvas | 41 x 30 cm | #18862

Scar Trees - Red River Gum | 2020 encaustic, oil on canvas | 45 x 30 cm | #18859

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Songlines Living to Fish I | 2020 oil on canvas | 170 x 110 cm | #18851

Wrong Way | 2021 mixed media on canvas | 30 x 40 cm | #19034

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Songlines Living to Fish II | 2020 oil on canvas | 170 x 110 cm | #18852

Kapi - Waterholes | 2021 oil, paper on canvas | 101 x 61 cm | #19032

Curriculum Vitae Collections Tiernan has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions nationally. Her works are held in private corporate collections in Australia, USA, United Kingdom, Europe and public collections including those at National Maritime Museum Sydney NSW; Parliament House Canberra, the Australian National University (ANU), the National Museum of Australia, and Legislative Assembly of Canberra. Tiernan is the recipient of a number of awards and grants from the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).

Solo Exhibitions 2021 2017 2015 2014 2007 2005 2004 2002

Memory Space, Cooee Art, Sydney, NSW Transculturation-sublime & Surreal Encounters of First Encounters in the Antipodes, Cooee Art, Sydney, NSW If only the walls could talk, Yately House Braidwood, NSW Farming without fences, Cooee Aboriginal Art Gallery, Sydney, NSW Farming without fences-How Aborigines made Australia, Belconnen Art Centre, Canberra, ACT Shared Histories, Tuggeranong Regional Gallery, ACT Songlines-Journeys through country, ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery, Canberra, ACT Songlines-Journeys through country, Gippsland Regional Art Gallery, Sale, VIC Silent Generations, Alliance Francaise, Canberra, ACT

2020 2017 2015 2014 2013 2012 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001

20|20, Cooee Art, Sydney, NSW Activist Expressionism-politics & Beauty in Urban Aboriginal Art- Artist talk, Cooee Art, Sydney, NSW Altenburg Galley, NSW Capitol Arts Patrons Organisation (CAPO) Fundraiser, CMAG Canberra, ACT Capitol Arts Patrons Organisation (CAPO) Fundraiser, CMAG Canberra, ACT Florieart, TAC Canberra, ACT Different stories, NAIDOC Week, TAC Canberra, ACT Unearthed, Cooee Art, Sydney, NSW The Perfect Alibi, Cooee Art, Sydney, NSW Picture this; alumni, ANU, School of Art Gallery, Canberra, ACT Vinyl, M16 Art Space, Canberra ACT Community Tracks, NAIDOC Week Exhibition, ATSI Cultural Centre, Canberra, ACT TRAP, Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Canberra, ACT Temporal Fold, M16 Gallery, Canberra, ACT Kamberri Dreaming, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, ACT Casablanca, Capitol Arts Patrons Organisation (CAPO) Fundraiser, NGA, Canberra, ACT ANU School of Art Drawing Prize, ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery, Canberra, ACT

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Selected Group Exhibitions

Silent Nowie | 2020 oil, paper on canvas | 41 x 30 cm | #18863

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE

Woi Wurrung Ancient Bark Canoe | 2021 mixed media on canvas | 40 x 30 cm | #19033

HELEN S. TIERNAN | MEMORY SPACE | 17 APRIL - 8 MAY 2021