Wagga Wagga Art Gallery · 2024
Look at Me Notes from the Curators
Curatorial statement
Collections have a way of appearing more complete than they really are.
A work enters a gallery. It is given a number, a title, a maker, a date. It becomes part of a collection and, eventually, part of the institutional record that sits around it.
But records have gaps.
Sometimes a name is missing. Sometimes a relationship has been forgotten, a history reduced to a line of text, or a connection to place left undocumented. What we know about an object can appear settled simply because no one has returned to ask another question.
This exhibition began with those gaps.
Alongside Gallery staff, we returned to three works: Kate and Bianca, The Blue Tie and Untitled.
Each had a connection to Wagga Wagga. Each also carried absences in the information surrounding it.
Those absences became the thread we followed.
Follow the notesNotes on one work
Of the three works, I chose Untitled: a painted panel given to the Gallery by Margaret Carnegie in 1980 and recorded simply as Unknown.
There was very little else.
So I began with four questions.
What is it?
Where did it come from?
Who made it?
How did it get here?
These notes follow where those questions led.
Looking closer
The first clues were physical.
A central figure. Ovoid shapes. Spirals. Earth pigments. A thin, fibrous surface.
It did not behave like a carved gope board or a shield. It was too light, too thin, too clearly made for another purpose.
The material and form pointed instead towards a painted sago palm spathe panel.
Pointing towards, though, is not the same as knowing.
- Unknown
- Four Figures, Central Australian Bark Painting, 1969
- Bark painting
- 370 × 330 mm
- Wagga Wagga Art Society WWAS1969.6
Another case of misattribution
Affixed to the frame was a small brass label: “Central Australian Bark Painting. Property of Wagga Wagga Art Society.”
The certainty of the label did not quite match the object. Its bark support, rarrk cross-hatching and figures pointed instead towards Arnhem Land.
It was a useful reminder: sometimes the object and the record tell different stories.
- Mithinarri Gurruwiwi
- Bark Painting From North East Arnhem Land, 1971
- Bark painting
- 1150 × 550 mm
- Wagga Wagga Art Society WWAS1971.2
Rarrk, a language of cross-hatching
Mithinarri Gurruwiwi's bark painting offered a point of comparison.
Its fine rarrk cross-hatching belongs unmistakably to Arnhem Land painting traditions.
Placed nearby, it made visible what the other label had missed.
Four regions, three dead ends
Papua New Guinea was only the beginning.
The Highlands, Southern region and Islands each offered possible comparisons, but the materials and forms did not quite fit.
The strongest connection emerged in the Momase region, around the Sepik River, where the Abelam use sago palm spathe in ceremonial art.
For the first time, material, form and place seemed to align.
The Abelam
The research could not recover the name of an individual maker.
It could, however, place the work within a much richer cultural context.
Among the Abelam, painted spathe panels form part of ceremonial life, connecting agriculture, ancestors, spirituality and community.
Unknown was no longer quite enough.
The magic of painting
Painting also changed how I understood the object.
Within Abelam traditions, paint can carry spiritual significance. Colour, material and symbol are not simply decoration; they participate in what the object means and does.
The surface was not something added afterwards.
It was part of the object's power.
- Timothy Akis
- Untitled, 1975
- Black ink on paper
- 750 × 560 mm
- Wagga Wagga Art Gallery 1980.32
Bridging tradition and contemporary expression
Timothy Akis offered another way of looking.
His drawings show Papua New Guinean artistic traditions continuing, adapting and moving through new forms.
Placed beside the panel, the two works resisted any easy division between "traditional" and "contemporary".
How it got here
Then the trail moved from Papua New Guinea to Wagga Wagga.
Margaret Carnegie donated the panel in 1980. Research suggests that some of her Sepik material may have come through the network of collector and dealer Senta Taft-Hendry.
It is a plausible route.
But not yet a complete one.
Saying what we know, and how we know it
That distinction became important.
Research can make a collection record better without making it complete.
Sometimes the evidence is strong. Sometimes it only suggests a possibility. Sometimes the right thing to record is simply that more work remains to be done.
Certainty should not be invented to fill a blank.
- Abelam community
- Painted sago palm spathe panel, 1980
- Sago palm spathe, natural pigments
- 1530 × 400 mm
- Wagga Wagga Art Gallery 1980.126
What the record says now
The panel entered the collection as Unknown and Untitled.
Research now connects it to the Abelam community of Papua New Guinea's Sepik region and identifies it as a painted sago palm spathe panel.
Its individual maker remains unknown.
The record is fuller.
It is not finished.
Back on the wall
Eventually, the panel went back onto the wall.
The object itself had not changed.
What surrounded it had: more context, more questions, and a record that now said something different from the one we began with.
That, perhaps, was the point.
Not to solve the object, but to look again.
Views
-
The three walls of Look at Me. One work, one colour, one line of questions on each: blue for The Blue Tie, red for Kate and Bianca, orange for Untitled. -
The Untitled wall, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. -
Planning the wall during installation. -
The title wall. -
Examining the panel in the collection store. -
Looking closely. -
Planning the hang. -
Wall texts laid out on the floor. -
The gallery during installation. -
Works along the wall, waiting to be hung. -
The arrows mocked up in tape. -
The floor questions going down.
Moving image
Listen
Elsewhere
- Look at Me at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery Exhibition page