NEWELL HARRY - WEAVING WORLDS
Published: The Big Issue #357, June/July 2010.
The trans-cultural, collaborative works of artist Newell Harry drift between language, custom, currency and place. He speaks with Dan Rule about his exhibition as part of the 17th Biennale of Sydney.
There’s a particular sense of flux to the text works that comprise Newell Harry’s exhibition as part of the 17th Biennale of Sydney. Perched amid the echoing surrounds of Pier 2/3 at the Walsh Bay Warf, Harry’s traditionally woven Vanuatu gift mats carry the personal in-jokes, slang, lingua franca, motifs and markings of places, people and cultural contexts seemingly far-removed.
“NO POINT BEING KING SHIT OF TURD ISLAND”, reads one, the words woven amongst intricate patterns and configurations with twine gathered from pandanas plants in Vanuatu. “FUCK KNUCKLE UNCLE PAT”, offers another.
A large, neon anagram of the phrase “THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS”, fixed to the opposite wall, throws an uneasy light across the space. “NERVELESS RATS HESITATE”, reads one interpretation. “AS VENERIAL THEISTS REST”.
For Harry – who was conceived in South Africa, born and raised in Sydney, and has spent much of the last decade travelling and living in Vanuatu’s Shepherd Islands – the works represent not only flashes of distinct geo-cultural vernacular, but the threads that, however subjectively, bind them together.
“Travelling between Port Vila in Vanuatu, South Africa and Sydney, I’ve come to love the kind of slang that’s inherent in each of the languages,” he says. “It’s almost as if almost as if they have this kind of crude poetry to them.”
“I wanted to make a series that referenced not just the language but used the weaving to literally interweave those cultural contexts together.”
Made in collaboration with weavers from the Shepherd Islands as part of an original exhibition, Views from the Couch, which showed at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery in 2007, Harry’s wordplays, homonyms and rhymes cut much deeper than their seemingly frivolous articulation might imply. For him, they are a point of exchange between various strands of heritage, culture and identity.
“The particular language used in that series slips between Afrikaans, which is the mother tongue of my grandmother who’s mixed race South African or ‘coloured’ as she would have been classified during Apartheid, and then Bislama, which is a lingua franca in Vanuatu that I guess you could call a form of pigeon English,” explains the 37-year-old. “Then there’s just the kind of slang and in-jokes that my mates and I use.”
It speaks volumes about Harry’s work. Across a career that has stretched the best part of a decade and a half, various solo exhibitions and residencies in South Africa and Paris, he has developed a practice that draws on notions travel, collaboration and the scope for cultural and geographical interpretation and translation they afford. “Travelling between places and working with weavers or working with neon fabricators, to me, is a way of not just referencing the contexts I’m working in, but also as a means to produce work without being stuck in the one place,” he offers. “It’s a means of trying to keep the process of working far more open.”
“I like the idea not just of translating languages, but translating the language into a visual or material form via specific cultural means and tools. If you’re collaborating with someone or working with people that weave or bend glass or whatever, you’re working with them to translate the idea,” he urges.
“You, as the artist, bring the idea along and then they bring along the practical means, so there’s sort of this meshing of both those grounds to achieve some point of equilibrium, which ends up being the work itself.”
Born in Sydney in 1973 – after his mother, who was pregnant with him at the time, had fled the apartheid regime for Australia the previous year – Harry studied art at the National Art School before attaining a Bachelor and later a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney’s College of Fine Arts. While his early work explored various drawing and sculptural techniques, it was his introduction to Oceanic and tribal art that had perhaps the most telling effect on his approach. He joined the Oceanic Art Society and began travelling and collecting artefacts and objects from Papua New Guinea and the Pacific region.
“In many ways that stuff influences me more than contemporary art,” says Harry. “I’m drawn to the functionality of tribal art and its kind of sense of power. It’s not something that’s made for a white cube; it’s work that has a social significance and has been made for specific rituals, which is what gives them their strength.”
Harry first travelled to Vanuatu in 2004, where he and colleague Carl Amneus collaborated on a printmaking project with a young chief of the Mataso community, Jack Siviu Martau. It was in this context that Harry was introduced to the notion of the gift mat.
“They’re called gift mats because they’re exchanged as gifts and mats are actually a form of currency,” he explains. “Like Jack, who is getting married soon, was complaining to me recently about how he has to get something like fifty mats made and get together a whole bunch of pigs that will be given as a bridal dowry.”
“I became really interested in how, by putting them in an exhibition in a Western context, that form of currency shifted and changed and began circulating in a different economy. So the mats aren’t just about wordplay but about value and currency as well.”
But it’s perhaps the personal threads that run through Harry’s work that make it so engaging. 2008 body of work Fish, or Cut Bait? (2008) featured a disparate palette of cultural and personal cues and traces. The nest-like, wall-mounted sculpture Voodoo Ray was woven from a trail of found materials and ephemera from Harry’s life and travels. Garden hoses, cable ties, jute twine, doilies and shredded Mother Hubbard dresses from Martau’s older sister in Vanuatu were woven to create a personal and cultural melange. The installation Ovid/Void, meanwhile, featured an old photograph of Harry’s mother before leaving South Africa mounted on the wall above a scattering of fossil-like found stone vessels and concrete pavers, the neon anagram “OVID” set on the wall beneath the photograph and “VOID” laying amid the vessels on the floor, seemingly intimating Harry’s impending birth in a new land and the family’s abandonment of their life in South Africa.
Indeed, Harry’s fascination with his own family lineage has occupied much of his recent work. His 2009 exhibition at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Lloyd Triestino, comprised found family photographs from his mother’s voyage to Australia on the ship of the same name and her curious wedding to Harry’s stepfather.
Harry takes up the story: “The strangeness of that particular event is that my stepdad, who was a knockabout, AFL-loving bloke from Western Australia, happens to be an identical twin and that both identical twins, living on different sides of the country at the time, ended up meeting and then marrying coloured South African women,” he laughs. “The chances of that are just crazy.”
“They had a double wedding, and in the photographs, you can see the ANZAC memorial and these coloured brides with these very Australian identical twins,” he giggles again. “It’s so strange that I’m sure many people would have seen it as a fabrication, but of course, it was a true story.”
For Harry, it’s exploring such linkages – connecting such threads – that gives his resonance.
“I really try to load my work with personal content,” he says. “Like with the mats and the types of slang and types of phrases, they all have personal connections.”
“Some of them reference family and place, and then some of them are just silly slogans that me and my friends use, like ‘No point of being king shit of turd island’,” he laughs. “There’s always a personal element that runs through things.”
Newell Harry shows at Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay Warf until August 1 as part of the 17th Biennale of Sydney.
bos17.com
