Maudie Jerrold, Aileen Sandy, Clifton Mack
On entering Future Perfect’s intimate gallery space, visitors were met by a mesmerising plane of colour and form. Dispersed over an earthy-green expanse, yellow dots, red strokes and black markings gravitated towards a central cluster, pulsating with gentle rhythm in spite of their fixed state. The piece—an acrylic painting on canvas by indigenous artist Maudie Jerrold—was a representation of Coolabah Seeds common to arid coastal regions of Western Australia. Yet this fact seemed secondary to the work’s invocation of ineffable forces, and the dependency of symbolic form on visual structures to convey meaning.
Such meditations on form and content were characteristic throughout Yinjaa-Barni. The exhibition displayed a concise selection of recent paintings by three artists belonging to the eponymous artists’ group—Maudie Jerrold (b.1950), Aileen Sandy (b.1951) and Clifton Mack (b.1952). The group’s first presentation outside Australia, it delivered a focused look at contemporary Indigenous art from the region, all the while revealing subtle differences between the three artists’ practices in style and content. Evidence of the widening scope of Indigenous art today, Yinjaa-Barni provoked thinking about this kind of art’s mediation in a gallery context and its understanding by audiences less familiar with its formal lexicon.
If Maudie Jerrold’s dots, lines and strokes owe their lineage to traditional Aboriginal painting, they are by no means derivative. Rather, her works demonstrated a consummate use of foundational motifs that tested the veracity of human vision and fused emblems of the past and present. Picket Fence was almost anything but, its white slats barely visible beneath strokes of green, purple and coloured dots. It was an understated work, which revealed tensions between methods of land demarcation favoured by the West and the more