Exhibition Preview: Red Heart of Australia &The Utopia Collection
Sat 25 March at 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Red Heart of Australia is an exhibition showcasing paintings of national importance created by Aboriginal artists from across Central Australia united by the colour red. These precious works from the National Museum of Australia’s collection show how the colour red expresses relationships to Country, family, ritual and spirituality. It’s the colour of the desert, the giant rock Uluru in central Australia, and the colour of a blazing sunset over the water.
The exhibition was presented as part of a cultural exchange program by the National Museum of Australia with the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), Beijing in 2021.
Utopia Batiks: Textile Artworks from the Utopia Collection™ Bequest The Utopia Batik collection is an archive of assembled pieces by some of Australia’s most prominent aboriginal women artists of the Eastern Anmatyerre and Alyawarre people, centred at the remote community of Utopia, 270 kms north east of Alice Springs.
First introduced into the Utopia community in the 1970s, Batik was largely adopted by women in the community who used the wax resist technique to depict the layered nature of Tjukurrpa stories – surface and hidden knowledge. Over time the batik technique of layering, was adopted by artists in their painting to create artworks distinctive to the Utopia community of artists.
The Utopia Collection™ Bequest is made up of a core group of Aboriginal textile artworks complemented by works in other media that were designated as important archival pieces in the evolution of art production on the Utopia Homelands. Utopia is a region covering approximately 5000 square kilometres of land northeast of Alice Springs and is home to around 2000 Aboriginal people.
The pieces came from the archives of the now defunct Utopia Cultural Centre. The tribal elders on the governing body of that Centre presented the Utopia Collection Bequest to Tamworth Regional Gallery with the intention that the archive be kept intact as an aesthetic, cultural, historical and educational reference for posterity. A Tamworth Regional Gallery Touring Exhibition.
26 March to 30 April 2023
Image: UTOPIA BATIK COLLECTIVE, Sample Piece (collective testing of tjap technique), (detail)1995, batik, azoic dyes, silk satin, 235 x 115 cm. The Utopia Collection™ Bequest 2000. Photograph: Lou Farina
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