Jonathan Kimberley and the Kayili Artists
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n mid 2008, the small community of Kayili Artists—an arts organisation based in Ngaanyatjarra country on the edge of the Gibson Desert—invited the Hobart-based artist Jonathan Kimberley to their home town of Patjarr to be an artist in residence. The invitation came more than twelve months after the first meeting between Kimberley and the Kayili Artists, a period in which a strong trust slowly developed through close negotiations and a shared attraction to artistic experimentation. That trust continued through Kimberley’s first residency in Patjarr in July 2008. Following initial collaborations and more extensive discussion, the artists—including a remarkable group of elders called the Kayili Ladies, comprising Ngipi Ward, Pulpurru Davies, Nancy Carnegie, Manupa Butler and Norma Giles—decided to continue working with each other, to open up new dialogues in collaborative painting from Country.
In many respects, such modes of collaboration were not new to any of the artists involved. It has, after all, been a consistently important practice between desert artists for many years now (even though most works made this way are still, whether rightly or wrongly, attributed to a single artist). Kayili Artists have also experimented extensively with their painting, culminating in such projects as the series of car bonnets painted with stories and maps of country, and presented at the 2008 exhibition ‘Contemporary Australia: Optimism’ in Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. Kimberley, too, has long worked with others, most notably in a long-term collaboration with the writer and activist pura-lia meenamatta (Jim Everett) in Tasmania. Together, they have sought to conjoin word and image on canvas so as to create different ways of mapping and engaging with meenamatta country in northeastern Tasmania, a rethinking of histories... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline