LORRAINE CONNELLY-NORTHEY

Born 1962 in Swan Hill, Australia. Lives and works in Culcairn, Australia.

Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Narbong (Waradgerie for the pouch of a marsupial), 2007, ripple-roofing iron, blue-green acrylic, rust and tie-wire, 49 x 26 x 10 cm. Private collection

Lorraine Connelly-Northey uses found and scrap materials to produce finely crafted objects which reference their place of origin in a number of powerful ways. Connelly-Northey is a Waradgerie woman who grew up in the area where the Mallee bush meets the Murray River, and this background – and its meshing and tension with her father’s Irish heritage – has informed her work. The material she chooses for her artwork has a strong personal significance. She initially considered working with plants and grasses, but decided that it was not appropriate to use such materials as they did not express the areas that bordered the different language groups around her mother’s country. For this reason, she turned to the discarded detritus of local farming: rusted corrugated iron, fencing wire, chicken wire and barbed wire. By recycling and reinventing these materials, leftovers from failed or forgotten rural settler communities and objects most would consider ‘rubbish’, she evokes the displacement of older cultures by rural Australian settlers and the contemporary tension between these two distinct yet interwoven histories.

Connelly-Northey transforms these found objects and metals into vessels and garments traditionally used by her ancestral people, such as narbong (Waradgerie for marsupial pouch) and kooliman (bowls). Her ‘narbongs’ are far larger than traditional string bags in scale and her mixed-media assemblages of metals, sometimes incorporating fringes of feathers and fur, are a contemporary evocation of traditional utilitarian forms. Kooliman were used in her mother’s country for winnowing, a technique of separating seed from chaff, and the artist employs a range of materials to produce these vessels.

Along with the discarded man-made materials, Connelly-Northey also employs natural elements, such as emu and pink galah feathers, stones, bone, wood and shells. She has used rusted galvanised iron, bed springs and feathers to recreate now very rare objects such as the o’possum-skin cloaks that were traditionally produced in the north-west of Victoria. Connelly-Northey has been concentrating on these cloaks for the past few years, drawn by their rarity and intrigued by their significance in her culture, being traditionally worn only by men at certain events. The artist maintains a distance and respect for their cultural significance, and in her versions is developing her own symbols and markings. These cloaks, resembling patchwork blankets, reference aerial views of the land and the artist’s own story. In these deeply personal works, she examines her country and heritage, developing her own symbolic language that includes reference to her totem – the goanna. Fringed with various items such as feathers and wood, Connelly-Northey’s cloaks draw on the childhood memory of being allowed to pick up five things to keep. In her parents’ and grandparents’ culture things were not wasted, and Connelly-Northey’s work honours this bower-bird like accretion of objects as well as a necessary strategy of recycling, as she evocatively transforms disparate, often waste, materials into contemporary artworks.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘Narbongs’, A Room of Her Own, Artroom5, Adelaide, Australia
2008 ‘Narbongs’, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, Australia
2008 ‘The Weaver’, Mossenson Galleries, Perth, Australia
2008 ‘Narbongs’, Aboriginal & Pacific Art, Sydney, Australia
2005 ‘Hunter-Gatherer’, Mildura Arts Centre, Mildura, Australia

Selected Group Exhibitions

2008 ‘Handle with Care’, 10th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
2007 ‘Murray Cod: The biggest fish in the river’, Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, Swan Hill, Australia
2006–09 ‘Land Marks’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
2006 ‘Contemporary Commonwealth’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
2005 ‘Woven Forms’, Object Gallery, Sydney, Australia

Selected Bibliography

Lorraine Connelly-Northey, ‘Lorraine Connelly-Northey’, Cross Currents, exhibition catalogue, Linden St Kilda Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne, 2005
Julie Gough, ‘Being There, Then and Now: Aspects of South-East Aboriginal Art’, Land Marks, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 86, 125–31
Kevin Murray, Craft Unbound: Make the Common Precious, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2005, pp. 42–45
Judith Ryan, ‘Lorraine Connelly-Northey: Hunter-Gatherer’, 2006 Contemporary Commonwealth, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 50–55