Description
Dhukumul Wanambi
Etching
Image: 24.5 x 49cm Paper: 39 x 66.5cm on Hahnemuhle 300gsm
Year: 2019
ID: 3389-19
Bathi – String Figure
As part of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, in the time he spent at Yirrkala anthropologist Frederick McCarthy concentrated on collecting and recording string figures known in Yolngu as matjka. Working with Ngarrawu Mununggurr as his principal guide and collaborator, they made what stands as the largest known collection from one community at one time, in the world. The number of different designs that Ngarrawu could faultlessly replicate suggested that for Yolngu, string figure making was a highly developed cultural practice, in McCarthy’s words ‘an art’. Yolŋu call this field of knowledge retention through string – matjka.
McCarthy collected 193 mounted string figures, now in the Australian Museum, Sydney. They were made by slipping the finished figure off the maker’s hands and affixing it to a cardboard support. The ephemeral nature of string figure making as a performance process, was thus turned into a fixed and stable two-dimensional form. These mounted figures, both strange and beautiful, the product of a cross-cultural encounter between Yolngu and western anthropology, have inspired a further exchange. This is the third series of prints made as a result of the Yirrkala community’s reconnection with the collection.
McCarthy collected 193 mounted string figures, now in the Australian Museum, Sydney. They were made by slipping the finished figure off the maker’s hands and affixing it to a cardboard support. The ephemeral nature of string figure making as a performance process, was thus turned into a fixed and stable two-dimensional form. These mounted figures, both strange and beautiful, the product of a cross-cultural encounter between Yolngu and western anthropology, have inspired a further exchange. This is the third series of prints made as a result of the Yirrkala community’s reconnection with the collection.
In this iteration the emphasis was on engaging young students from the Yirrkala CEC to become familiar and competent with this old Yolŋu skill.
The prints were made using a soft-ground etching technique. First the string was made from the pounded and softened inner bark of Darraŋguḻk (Kurrajong) and then the separated fibres are twined on the thigh and then retwined into a two ply string. In Yirrkala, the string figure designs were transferred by the artists from their hands to a cardboard support, and then pressed and secured. In Yirrkala, they were placed on etching plates treated with a soft-ground medium, and run through the press, leaving an imprint capturing the fine textured detail of the bush string. The acid biting into the metal plate then made these marks permanent and replicable. In the lines of the figures can be read the controlled manipulation of the string to form a pattern, against which play the random energies of chance.
The prints were made using a soft-ground etching technique. First the string was made from the pounded and softened inner bark of Darraŋguḻk (Kurrajong) and then the separated fibres are twined on the thigh and then retwined into a two ply string. In Yirrkala, the string figure designs were transferred by the artists from their hands to a cardboard support, and then pressed and secured. In Yirrkala, they were placed on etching plates treated with a soft-ground medium, and run through the press, leaving an imprint capturing the fine textured detail of the bush string. The acid biting into the metal plate then made these marks permanent and replicable. In the lines of the figures can be read the controlled manipulation of the string to form a pattern, against which play the random energies of chance.
This matjka represents the gay’wu form of bathi. A string bag which is in fact made from the same Darraŋguḻk (Kurrajong) bark string as the string made to create this print.
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