Adelaide Contemporary, Art Gallery of South Australia, unsuccessful competition submission of finalist team of Adjaye Associates.
Commissioner Art Gallery of South Australia
Architects Adjaye Associates
CuratorBarbara Flynn, Art Advisor
Koolmatrie’s life story is that of a father and mother who worked every day of their lives and introduced their children to work, keeping their family together when other families were pulled apart by Australian government policies. As they survived together, a young Yvonne learned to bag-sew, trap rabbits, pick fruit, class wool, and work as a ‘tarboy’ in shearing sheds across South Australia – her firsthand experience of the state is extensive. They were always in the family group and they always returned to the Riverland where Yvonne lives today:
Even though we had nothing, we never missed out on anything, because we had our parents with us all the time, and I think that’s the most important thing.
And because of Mum and Dad I have knowledge of who I am, because I live on the land, I walked on the land and I slept on the land. And at the end of the day, the land will claim me.1
Yvonne has carried this richness and solidity throughout the different stages of her life. Family and life on the land explain Yvonne’s excellence as an artist and the quality she insists upon when she selects sedge to weave with, the bilbili and kayi of Ngarrindjeri language.2 The lesson of her life and her art form is something to behold for many of us, unmoored as we can be in an increasingly autonomous, homogeneous and impersonal world some people would say has gone crazy.
Yvonne speaks of weaving as bringing people together. Yvonne’s son Chris Koolmatrie goes further, saying, ‘Weaving is one of the practices responsible for reviving the Ngarringjeri culture and language. Basket weaving stitches things together – the culture and the history, the people and the land – it keeps them together.’3
Koolmatrie is the ideal figure to collaborate with David to make a museum of meaning to people in South Australia, the larger nation and the world. David’s architecture appreciates delicacy that is underpinned with meaning. The stitch of Koolmatrie’s weaving is the stuff of David’s inspiration: it resembles the Yoruba-inspired latticework of the great new Smithsonian museum NMAAHC on the Mall in Washington, DC– and, even more, profoundly, what the museum symbolises: the finding of a national home for African Americans. Koolmatrie and her family managed with more expedient shelter during her early life because they had one another. Being together as a family was their ‘home’.
The most consequent presentation of Yvonne’s art was Riverland: Yvonne Koolmatrie, the exhibition mounted by the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2015–16 (curator Nici Cumpston, Artistic Director, TARNANTHI). In 1988, the Gallery acquired its first work by Yvonne – a large woven bowl. Yvonne’s participation in what Adelaide has to offer has been constant and longstanding. It was at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide in 1982 that she first saw the weavings of the old people like Clarence Long (Milerum) who lived by the Coorong. Seeing Long’s work influenced her greatly. As a woman who had lived on the land, she was also open to what the city had to offer.
Younger Aboriginal women artists are beginning to break through and find expression across Australia. Barangaroo is commissioning Aboriginal women for temporary art projects and Aboriginal women are represented in the competition for an important new artwork for Sydney Airport. The younger artists look up to Koolmatrie as a woman who has preserved tradition and a way of life and done it her way. She is a galvanising figure.
Koolmatrie will be the best possible guide for David as he designs the new Adelaide Contemporary Gallery of Time, drawing on her innate knowledge of how to merge worlds through art, the lessons of life and her story – land and city, Australia and other worlds and cultures.
Text by Barbara Flynn, May 2023
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Yvonne Koolmatrie, quoted in Riverland: Yvonne Koolmatrie, Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2015, p. 26.
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Ngarrindjeri is an Aboriginal nation of 18 language groups who occupied, and still inhabit, the Lower Murray, Coorong and Lakes area of South Australia. Source: State Library of South Australia website, accessed at the link guides.slsa.sa.gov.au/Aboriginal_peopleSA/Ngarrindjeri.
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Chris Koolmatrie, quoted in Riverland: Yvonne Koolmatrie, p. 18.