Art Guide has published a profile on artist Carbiene McDonald Tjangala from Papunya Tjupi Arts Centre.
'Papunya Tjupi Arts is an Aboriginal owned not-for-profit community art centre based in Papunya—located approximately 240 kilometres northwest of Mparntwe (Alice Springs). It’s also where McDonald first began painting. “All the young fellas were encouraging me to paint,” explains McDonald. “Now I’m painting, I’ve started working.”
With great movement in his practice, McDonald is committed to painting the four Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) stories inherited from his father Snowy McDonald. And this commitment is undeniable: “He’s the first one to arrive at the Papunya Tjupi and then last one to leave each day,” says Dallas Gold, director of RAFT artspace.
It was documentation of McDonald’s earlier work on Papunya Tjupi Arts’s Instagram that grasped the attention of many—including Gold—propelling McDonald’s first solo exhibition at RAFT artspace in 2018. It was a sell-out show. “There’s an inherited visual language in [McDonald’s] work but he’s also inventing a visual language,” explains Gold. “He’s inventing a language that alludes to something that he’s inherited without giving too much away.”
While McDonald’s new work at RAFT still has his signature iterative layers of paint and square formations, it also yields subtle yet meaningful shifts with colour and composition. Gold explains that McDonald is undoubtedly becoming more playful and dynamic within the structures of his work. The paintings demonstrate “strong statements informed by knowledge of Country and about Country—but they’re also inventing a language to allude to these knowledge systems, or they’re trying to reestablish this—so this is something that’s very new,” says Gold. As McDonald has explained, “I only paint my Country. I felt I had to paint this way, paint my homelands…in the future I’m going to keep making artworks of my Country.”'
- Autumn Royal for Art Guide, 2022
IMAGE:
CARBIENE MCDONALD
Four Dreamings 2021
544-21
acrylic on canvas
122 x 181 cm