Articles - 22 July 2007

Jigalong

Gumbaya is singing, she is singing a basket into life, women join in the song, lifting their colourful woven goannas and Kuka baskets above their heads, dancing sitting down. This is Jigalong. It's 40c+ in the shade and we are at the tail end of a weeks workshop. A long row of grass and wool goannas is packed cheek by jowl on school benches, a collection of Kuka baskets stacked on top. Various other vessels, animals and birds are balanced amongst them. A very big bush turkey Kippara made from the meadow hay we trucked up to the Eastern Pilbara stands looming over everything. View images

Martu women who come from the Eastern Pilbara and Sandy Desert communities of Jigalong, Parngurr, and Punmu, in West Australia have been making coiled fibre baskets for the past 4 or 5 years.

Early this year through the Martumilli Arts Project, managed by Gabrielle Sullivan, I was invited to do a workshop in Jigalong to introduce fibre sculpture as an adjunct to the basketry. Knowing that the women who were to attend would be keen makers we brought two bales of meadow hay from the south rather than depending on grass collecting.

Temperatures were commonly in the high 40s, there was no women's centre vehicle and I was not sure if the local grass would shape itself to sculpture. It is a fairly stiff grass whereas meadow hay or fodder is easily shaped.

Jigalong is where the 'Rabbit Proof Fence' film was based. Not faraway from the community is the fence that the girls followed. And in fact some of the daughters and granddaughters of those girls are making baskets now.

For the workshop we were able to use a covered concrete floor at the school. Imagine 20 women, 100 balls of coloured wool, 2 bales of meadow hay, some small children in care of their grannies, assorted dogs and you will have some idea of how amazing it looked and was. It was red hot so we were kept busy with the water run in between sitting and sharing.

We collected meat pie tins (FrayBentos), which are purchased ready to eat after heating over a fire. The empty tins are discarded often with the lid still partly attached. The basic shape of the tin lends itself to becoming a larger vessel (basket) if fibre coiling is built onto it. We selected the best we could find, no rust etc but some quite flattened. Then holes were punched along the circular edge. Grass was coiled directly into the holes establishing a very strong basket bowl. The pie tin has quite a colourful label painted onto it and that has become part of the overall design.

Kuka is the word for meat so we loosely named them Kuka baskets. By the workshops end eight had been made. (Now in the collection of the West Australian Museum.) Goannas occupy a special niche within Martu culture, each day in season the older women walk away into the land hunting goanna. It is not unusual for a very old woman to do a 20 kms walk in an afternoon looking for and finding goanna (or several). The bush is burnt off as they walk so one can see for enormous distances how far away individuals are.

When we started making grass and wool goannas each one became larger than the previous one. Through a process of wrapping and stitches bundles of the grass over and over with multi- coloured wools, sometimes for 3 or more hours, the creatures took on the appearance of massive bundles of colour with legs. Individual characteristics became visible and there would be hoots of laughter as various goannas appeared.

The upper schoolgirls joined us in making small figures with sticks, grass and wools giving them the feel for using these materials.

Several weeks after completion some of the fibre sculptures were exhibited in Perth at Randell Lane Art including all the Kuka baskets. Others found their way to the Courthouse Gallery in Port Hedland where a second fibre event followed Jigalong and accompanied Woven Forms: Contemporary basket making in Australia exhibition which was on at Port Hedland at the time.

Clever with our hands involved a 2 week fibre art workshop with school children and the local community at the Courthouse Arts Centre. Developed by FORM and organised by Carly Davenport Acker it also enabled Nola Taylor a Martu woman from Parngurr to attend and be one of the tutors along with Janene McCauley Bott and myself Nalda Searles.

Nalda Searles
July, 2007

Nalda Searles lives and works out of Western Australia. She is a fibre textiles maker and teacher and focusses on use of plant fibre and recycled materials. Nalda has undertaken many workshops around Australia and in remote communities. Her work is represented in RECOIL curated by Margie West, which will tour nationally. A dialogue with Kevin Murray about making can be read on the blog Fodder.

Also see: 716 craft·design Issue #23 August 2007
Special issue on Indigenous craft and design