Current Muse– John Wolseley
Words–
Nat Woods
@nat.woods_
Muse & Images–
John Wolseley
John Wolseley is an artist who works within nature – he doesn’t capture scenery, he brings the audience deep inside landscapes, immersing them in the intricacies of an entire ecosystem. For the past nine years he has been collaborating with Mulkun Wirrpanda, a Yolngu artist and senior artist of the Dhudi-Djapu clan of the Dhuwa moiety. Through their exhibition Midawarr / Harvest, John and Mulkun share the edible plants of East Arnhem Land through their two very different perspectives – one steeped in the ancient wisdom and connection of Yolngu dreaming, and one shaped by western science and education. I had the pleasure of speaking to John about this collaboration and the greater purpose of his work.
You say that your art captures how we move and dwell within landscapes. What do you mean by that?
I think I was sort of getting at the way that, our society and our culture, is so unbelievably disconnected from nature, for various reasons, but I have always moved within nature, and done paintings which are trying to get into or unite, into nature, I realised that I carry on my life by doing that all the time in different parts of Australia, so by dwelling I mean being within. And then if I can do the paintings, which are more like in-scapes, or in-dwellings, or inter-beings, then I could actually help reconnect people to the natural world.
The show at the moment which is the extension in a way to Mulkun’s show [Midawarr / Harvest], the one in Sydney, I’ve done a lot of paintings of mangrove swamps. Now, I’ve done that by trying to get into the life world of the trees, the beetles, the moths, that live in that particular ecosystem. And what is so fascinating is that if you find an ecosystem, you’ll find that everything moves and lives in a different way, and that if you can get into, truly look into, all those creatures, then something amazing happens. A lot of it is to do with a behaviourist writer, called Jakob von Uexküll who wrote a book called A Foray Into The World Of Animals And Humans – the buddhist poets said once that ‘in order to paint a cicada, you have to become a cicada’ and so Uexküll in a similar way said that you have to try to get into the ‘umwelt’, the life world, of that cicada. So where I am looking at the mangroves, I have been doing the strange thing of getting into the life world of the mangrove worms that move up and down those trees, but also into the energy and amazing flow of the trees themselves. So I think that’s what I mean of dwelling within.
Yes, I’m looking at your piece from Midawarr / Harvest, ‘Distant glimpses of the great floodplain seen through a veil of trees and hanging vines’ and I can see that it’s not just a landscape, there’s all these different layers like the root systems, the trees, and you can see off into the distance, but you can see that everything is interacting – you’re not just capturing the beauty, you’re capturing all the intricacies of the whole ecosystem like you said.
And you see Mulkan does this far more than any white person, for instance she sometimes comes in to the art centre and says “Oh I think I’m going to paint a fig tree” and she immediately starts on a big painting, because she knows how that fig tree moves and lives. And then the next day she’ll do another species of plant. In other words, because she hasn’t lost connection with the natural world, she can actually sit down and paint something like 35 or more different plants [from memory alone].
I read that in the book that you would both be going out and gathering these bush foods and bringing them back, and it sounded as though you were really observing and getting up close to the plants, whereas Mulkun was just painting the plants from what she knew, from memory I guess – from the disconnected white perspective we have to have things right in front of us to capture it, we can’t just bring the essence of the plant to mind from memory.
That’s right.
So tell us how Midawarr, the exhibition and your collaboration with Mulkun Wirrpanda, came about.
It came about because some wonderful people in Darwin, Angus and Rose Cameron, who run the Nomad Art Gallery, decided to try and get four balanda (or foreigner) artists to meet up in Blue Mud Bay, with four Yolngu artists, and for us all to make prints. And so they had Basil Hall who is a wonderful print maker, he turned up with masses of etching plates, and for ten days us artists wandered around painting the place. And then they were all printed, and all the prints went on tour around Australia.
The exciting thing was, in answer to your question, that while we were doing that, Mulkun out of the blue, asked me to be her Wawa or brother, and since then, ever since then, it might be nine years ago, she has made perhaps 200 amazing bark paintings, and I’ve been painting the same plants. We sort of hatched a plot that in a way that while she was doing hers, I’d also do a lot.
It almost sounds like a friendly competition between the two of you… I’ll paint this and you paint it too and we’ll see what happens.
I think it comes back to the reason of why she was painting these plants, and one of the strong reasons she was painting them all is that her people have become disconnected from these edible plants, and as she says, “my people are dying”. And if you’ve been to these communities, it’s quite extraordinary that there’s always a shop that sells real dreadful junk food, while outside in the forest there is an absolute supermarket of gorgeous foods which are incredibly healthy. So she wanted to do it and then she could see the divide in it too, and that I’d be part of the same project.
And you’re both reaching different audiences by working together.
Yes I think it’s rather amazing that she could see that it was important that I explained it to a white audience too.
Yeah, in the book it’s such a lovely mix of the botanical, I guess scientific description, then you’ve got the description from Mulkun in language, and then you’ve got the translation in English which shares how they harvest each plant, and how they cook it, and what they use it for. It seems such a nice mix and a coming together of two perspectives.
Yes, that’s right.
What sort of responses have you been getting to the exhibition?
Absolutely amazing responses actually. I get lots of emails and letters saying that they’ve found it incredibly moving and I think it’s partly because, when you went to the exhibition, you could see her bark of, let’s say, an amazing yam with its flowers and everything, and the exhibition was shown in such a way that you could look past that bark to my rendering of it on the painting. So they all said that was so wonderful to have two different visions of the same plant.
And sometimes they’re quite different – like the Buwakul, the vine, you had depicted it growing up a tree, and Mulkun had depicted it in these concentric circles … like the vine minus the tree.
Yes, absolutely right. That particular plant, Buwakul, she did about six paintings of that plant and each one was different. What was so fascinating was in one, I painted it here as this fascinating plant that wound around the tree – it’s beautiful, it’s got these yams in the ground and then it enters into the bark with more yams, and then goes round and round. So in my version, in the traditional western perspective, you could see that it was going round. But in her painting, you’ll see in some of them, she almost made a painting of circularity. And in the most abstract one, it was a circle, and that’s saying so much about the plant. But in another painting she painted it as she would’ve put her hand down and found the delicate stem of the yam and dug around it. In other words, she was painting the kinetic act of finding the yam, so that it is almost like a painting of the fascinating action and movement of a human being as it harvests something. Do you see what I’m saying?
Yes. It’s such a nice depiction of different ways of seeing and interacting with the plants.
Exactly, that’s what it’s all about.
“What I’m trying to do is show the power and beauty of the world, and how natural systems work, and get people to get excited about that. Which is another way of saying I am trying to get people to connect and look at that, and then my perhaps my belief is such people will stop doing all these terrible things.”
Yes. It’s such a nice depiction of different ways of seeing and interacting with the plants.
Exactly, that’s what it’s all about.
Another thing that struck me in one of the descriptions of one of the other types of yam, it was saying that the Yolngu would harvest the yam and break off what they needed, leaving a few centimetres still attached, and then replant that part of the yam so it could be re-harvested year after year, season after season.
Yes and you have to contrast that with what we western people do – we kill off all the natural plants that are in a place, then we plow it up, and then we sow foreign seeds into it, which we then harvest with a machine that uses masses of diesel, which is causing global warming. It’s something that I was continually up against, the way that those people [the Yolngu] relate to the earth, while we [white people] are doing more and more, just raping the land, and using it and not putting anything back.
You can see looking at this exhibition, at Midawarr / Harvest, it opens your eyes to whatever landscape you’re in. I’m reading the book here in Byron Bay, and I’m like ‘oh we have pandanus here’ and I’m going to the beach and looking at the pandanus more closely. You don’t have to be up in Arnhem Land to connect to the ideas and essence of the project.
It’s quite true and in fact there in Byron Bay you have quite a few of the vines and climbers. There are several I have actually seen in Byron Bay which are relatives of those in Arnhem Land.
Do you feel like there is a way to reconnect western society back to nature and to open our eyes and senses back to everything that’s around us?
Well this is what I was trying to talk about in my happening last week in the gallery in Sydney where I got everyone to enter into the umwelt, or life world, of beetles. And I had a strange kind of performance where people had to be drawn to different beetles that I’d made on tissue paper, and then when they chose the beetle they were drawn to, they were given big lumps of graphite and they drew all along the gallery walls, the paths that the beetles make under the bark.
It was really such fun because I was in sort of a drawing lesson, because I’d put the paper on a carpet on the wall so in order to make their lines, they had to push these lumps of graphite, rather than draw in a traditional way, so they had to feel like they were a grub and make the markings.
It sounds like you’re such an observer of nature, of these intricacies, and it seems like we all just need to open our eyes more.
That’s right. And somebody said once, that learning to paint, is actually learning to see.
And I suppose that what I should say is that a lot of this I do because I want to talk about the way we’re treating the world and in particular about climate change. And a lot of artists now are attempting to tell people about what shocking things are happening. About how we’re burning all these fossil fuels and how the climate is actually changing. And a lot of artists tend to lecture the public, and people are actually fed up with being lectured, they’ve got what’s called ‘eco-fatigue’, and what I find is that actually that way doesn’t work for me. What I’m trying to do is show the power and beauty of the world, and how natural systems work, and get people to get excited about that. Which is another way of saying I am trying to get people to connect and look at that, and then perhaps my belief is such people will stop doing all these terrible things.
Originally published in Paradiso Issue 9