Bella Kelly, Untitled Landscape (orange landscape), 1966, watercolour and gouache, image 25 x 38, frame 26 x 39. Private Collection. Purchased from the artist in Cranbrook.
Bella Kelly, Untitled Landscape (summer), c 1960s, watercolour and gouache, image 55.5 x 69, frame 56.5 x 70. Private Collection. Purchased from the artist in Kendenup.
Bella Kelly, Untitled Landscape (sunset), c late 1970s, watercolour and gouache, image 47.8 x 60, frame 67.2 x 79. Collection of C. A. Barnett. Purchased from the artist in Mt Barker.
Bella Kelly, Untitled Landscape (near Narrogin), c 1960, watercolour, image 27.5 x 36.5, frame 28 x 37. Collection of Claire Anderson.
Bella Kelly, Untitled Landscape (view through trees), c late 1980s, acrylic on canvas board, image 49 x 70, frame 56 x 77.5. Collection of Mt Barker Community College. Presented to the College by Geoff Narkle 1997.
In 1946 schoolmaster Noel White walked among his Noongar students at the Carrolup settlement and noticed a boy drawing a tree in an original-looking style.
Seeing an opportunity to connect with the children, Noel instituted landscape art classes, inspired by regular afternoon bush walks.
“This unleashed a flood of incredibly sophisticated drawings. Artworks were pouring out,” says John Curtin Gallery director Chris Malcolm.
Though Noel was a respectful facilitator, the pictorial style of the Carrolup School was apparently spontaneous and uniquely Noongar. The children attracted recognition and respect throughout Western Australia, even abroad. Their talent was precocious, considering “one, they were children; two, they were Aboriginal; and three, they were the stolen generation.”
Meanwhile, Bella Kelly, a Noongar woman and mother to some of the Carrolup school children, was forging a long and (eventually) celebrated painting practice. She also worked in the graphic Carrolup style, with its glowing sunsets, silhouetted trees and rolling horizons (often the Stirling Ranges, Kelly’s family country). Kelly was prolific and resourceful. She painted quickly, relentlessly, to support herself. Sold or bartered directly with buyers, her life’s work was distributed across WA.
When a call for Kelly’s artworks ran in the regional press, 230 privately owned works and countless anecdotes re-emerged, 51 of which comprise a touring retrospective coming to John Curtin Gallery. From these, curator Annette Davis and biographer Tony Davis interpret that the Carrolup style “emanated from Bella and was transmitted to the children,” says Malcolm.
For a time, Kelly camped over the river from Carrolup: “Anecdotes have surfaced about her hiding nearby, to get a glimpse of her children”. We don’t know if she made contact, but it’s compelling to imagine that somehow she passed on her traditions and her desire to visualise country.
“To think about the place of these two stories in the early stages of contemporary Noongar art just reinforces how alive Noongar culture is,” says Malcolm. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to uncover the relationships and history behind all these paintings.”
Bella Kelly
John Curtin Gallery
20 June – 14 August
The Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair debuts in partnership with the Melbourne Art Fair this weekend, offering a special preview of new and recent artworks from 37 Koorie artists and designers.
In her audacious new exhibition, the Filipina Australian artist Marikit Santiago skewers the myths of the western canon and give pleasure and power—as experienced by women of colour—an arresting new form.
French-born/Belgium-based Laure Prouvost animates her first major Australian survey with her hallmark absurdism. ‘Oui Move In You’ is a touring exhibition, and is now showing at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art.
Since 2009, the William Robinson Gallery has held regular exhibitions showcasing the prolific Queensland artist’s oeuvre. The latest is Numinous, focusing on landscape painting and showing the natural world through Robinson’s careful eye.
Carol Jerrems’ intimate and revealing portraits of women, now showing at the National Portrait Gallery, are a touchstone for a generation of writers and photographers. For Josephine Mead, they also galvanise the power—and limits—of feminist legacy five decades on.
Tongan legends and pop culture heroes face off in the work of Telly Tuita, an artist whose freewheeling visual language articulates the light and shade of experience and the multiple selves we contain. Tuita is now showing as part of Sydney Festival.
