Sageraw Thonar – Stories from the Southeasterly Season: Contemporary Expressions of Cultural Knowledge from Badu Art Centre
‘Reflecting our strong cultural traditions and our beautiful relationships with our world we carefully express our love and dedication to the ocean, to our Island and all of its creatures and animals. We show our relationships with the wind, rain, earth, the skies, stars and the sun.’1 The Badu Art Centre exhibition Sageraw Thonar at KickArts Contemporary Arts embodies this philosophy.
The Badu Art Centre, situated in the Western Island cluster of the Torres Strait, has been in operation for eight years. It is an Indigenous owned and governed centre that offers its fifteen artists a place to create work, share their cultural stories and build an enterprise. Badu Art Centre is relatively new in the history of Australian Indigenous art centres. It has a membership of both emerging and established artists including Alick Tipoti, Laurie Nona who is also the Manager of the centre, and Joseph Au who is also the Chair.
In the past eighteen months the centre has developed a new level of competency, evidenced by the acclaim they received when they exhibited at Sydney Contemporary in September 2015 in partnership with KickArts. The follow up exhibition at KickArts during the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair Sageraw Thonar – Stories from the Southeasterly Season: Contemporary Expressions of Cultural Knowledge from Badu Art Centre is equally impressive. What sets this particular exhibition apart is the scale of the work. Presenting ten two-metre lino (linoleum) prints is an ambitious undertaking, but it is one that has been successfully achieved. Justin Bishop, Director of KickArts says ‘this exhibition took over twelve months to plan – it was about bringing back the big print’.2
Works on paper appear to be