Kenneth Wong

FINALIST

‘Naked Wonder’

The mineral ochre walls describe a cross-section through time as much as the everyday and ceremonial life in Aboriginal culture. This image is presented as an interplay between the scale of the ochre walls and the resolution of the image; an abstracted photograph, taken on the banks of a creek in the West MacDonnell Ranges one late afternoon. The form, scale and texture of this landscape feature have been reimagined here as a piece of tapestry, capturing the drama of its setting and the naked wonder of earthly colours telling the threads of time. In and of itself, the ochre pits are architectonic - an exposed and consequently expressive landscape created from mining by generations of Aboriginal people.

The proposal for this tapestry design uses the loom as a device to weave together narratives told from the many parts that have been delicately notched out of this natural feature by ritual and incorporated as an important part of Aboriginal culture. The silken texture of ochre hues and glimmer from sunlight tracking across the exposed Mica and Heavitree Quartzite have been reset within the proportions of the framed image, and the scale of the ochre wall ultimately made ambiguous in its new material outcome. The tapestry becomes a portal-like, transitionary experience as one moves back and forth between scene and weave.

The design explores how material connects beings and things. On one hand the weft and warp of individual and collective memories are symbolic in the reconstruction of the image. On the other, the tapestry invites one to consider what evokes memories, what grounds a relationship between object and people, and what reinforces a sense of time and place.

The artwork is presented as an organic element geometrically framed in circular form, taking shape in place with the other foyer exhibits.