New leaf
Maralinga: the Anangu story
Written by the Yalata and Oak Valley communities with
Christobel Mattingley
South Australian children’s author and honorary doctor of UniSA Christobel Mattingley has teamed up with the Indigenous communities in Yalata and Oak Valley, to give an illustrated history of the remote SA region of Maralinga.
Through extensive research and community consultation, they use words and pictures to describe the history of the Maralinga Tjarutja lands, including early interactions with white explorers and settlers; the construction of the Transcontinental railway line; bush tucker; the United Aborigines’ Mission; and land rights. It also has a strong focus on the British bomb testing that took place there in the 1950s and the troublesome impact it had on the health and wellbeing of the community.
"This is our story," the community members say. "We have told it for our children, our grandchildren and their children. We have told it for you."
All royalties from the sale of the book will go back to the Yalata and Oak Valley communities.
Slow Art
Written by Dr Amanda Robins
Verlag, April 2009
Dr Amanda Robins, Studio Head of Painting and Drawing in Art, Architecture and Design at UniSA has published her PhD, Slow Art, with German publisher Verlag.
Slow Art examines the possibilities for contemporary art by looking at the practice of a range of contemporary and historical artists. Robins said it is the perfect antidote for our image-saturated age.
Exploring the work of a range of contemporary artists who use a meditative process, Slow Art argues for a counterpoint to the disposability of contemporary culture.
"I wanted to ask, why we, as artists, make art and what it might do for all of us - as artists and viewers," Robins said. "Can contemporary art reach beyond the need for entertainment and the shallow currency of fashionable social and political issues, or are we faced with the seemingly endless variety of what has become standardised as International Biennale art: consumed, digested and discarded as readily as last year’s wardrobe?"
Slow Art argues for a new art based on the hand and the body, unafraid of history and willing to talk about what it means to be human. Drawing on object relations theory and examining the evidence of the work produced by a range of Australian and international artists, Robins looks at the words of artists in notebooks, diaries and interviews. It also examines the work of Vermeer, Sanchez Cotan and Francisco Zurbaran as exemplars of a meditative mode of painting. The monograph is available through Amazon and all good bookshops.
Robins is also a practising artist and has recently been included in two exhibitions based in Sydney - The Sense of Touch (Macquarie University Gallery) and the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing at the Adelaide Perry Gallery in Presbyterian Ladies College. She has also recently been selected as a finalist in the City of Hobart Art Prize and the Tallinn Drawing Triennial in Estonia.