Past exhibition

This Everything Water

Kay Lawrence with Aubrey Tigan and Butcher Joe Nangan

Curator
Kay Lawrence

Guest scholars
John Kean and Diana Wood-Conroy

Exhibition launch
6pm Wednesday 5 March 2008

Exhibition open
Thursday 28 February - Friday 28 March

Artwork by Kay Lawrence 'This is rain' (detail)

'This is rain' (detail), 2007, grey woollen blanket, mother-of-pearl buttons, cotton
image © the artist

Open daily during the Festival of Arts 28 February-16 March, 11-5pm 18-28 March open Tuesday-Friday, 11-5pm (closed public holidays) Exhibition invite (PDF file 231kb, download Adobe Acrobat) Select the image to see it enlarged in a new screen. All images photographed by Michal Kluvanek All images © artist This Everything Water explores the symbolic resonances and material qualities of pearl shell through artwork by Kay Lawrence and engraved pearl shell from the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The exhibition includes Aboriginal pearl shell ornaments borrowed from the collection of the South Australian Museum and contemporary pearl shells engraved by Bardi and Djawi law man Aubrey Tigan and Nyigina law man Butcher Joe Nangan. Prior to the second world war 80% of the world's pearl shell came from 400 luggers working out of Broome. Much of this shell was exported to Great Britain to be made into buttons for the textile industry in centres like Birmingham. The work of Kay Lawrence comprises blankets stitched with mother-of-pearl buttons to make reference to the exploitative use of Indigenous Australian and Asian labour by the pearling industry in Broome during the early years of the 20c. Blankets stitched with buttons to create images of skulls, a pair of blanket under-trousers covered with pearl buttons, a crisp, white, starched suit like those that the pearling masters wore, allude in a poetic way to the inequalities and dangers of an industry that supplied the raw material for the buttons used on the clothes of ordinary people. But pearl shell was not only valued by the colonists. For Aboriginal people of the Kimberley the luminous, reflective surface of pearl shell is associated with water, with rain, the very basis of life. Shells are highly valued as potent objects, used in ceremony and for personal adornment and since white contact have been traded extensively throughout northwest and central Australia though traditional socio-economic exchange systems. The work of Butcher Joe Nangan and Aubrey Tigan depict ancestral stories, using traditional and contemporary motifs to attest to the importance of water in their country; for Butcher Joe, the south west Kimberley and the area around Broome; for Aubrey the northern Dampier Peninsula and the islands of King Sound. Kay Lawrence has also developed a body of work that uses the metaphorical connection of pearl shell with water to allude to the consequences of misusing water in a dry continent like Australia.
		Trading Shell Design Aubrey Tigan Courtesy of Short Street Gallery
		Honest Man Riji Aubrey Tigan Courtesy of Short Street Gallery
		This is rain Kay Lawrence
		This is rain (detail) Kay Lawrence