ARTIST PROFILE Issue 70 have featured our Melbourne Art Fair ‘24 artists Simone Arnol & Bernard Singleton. Read the full article by Claire G Coleman “Simone Arnol & Bernard Singleton washing away the toxins” here
Excerpt:
“In the series Emanate, 2023, Simone and Bernard have collaborated, combining their arts practices and their overlapping cultural knowledge to stage a series of photographs of members of their extended families holding cultural tools and weapons. Each model was painted up with clay and natural pigments in a pattern reflecting the cultural object they held, bringing the people into the artifacts and the artifacts into the people. This demonstrates in a visceral way the knowledge that we and our culture and Country (including our non-human relatives on Country) are inseparable. Unlike mainstream Australian culture we do not see ourselves as separate from nature or from Country but rather as a part of the natural world. That is the story told in the art.
That knowledge brings healing, returning to and maintaining culture brings healing, healing the land brings healing, working with community brings healing.
Yimbi (Basket – to leach out toxins, destress or filter out noise), 2023, part of the Emanate series, features a soaking or leaching basket, an item that was common to most Aboriginal cultures before colonisation. These baskets were used to soak poisonous nuts or tubers to leech out the toxins, depending on the food item being treated that way, they were either soaked raw or cooked, and the treated food items were important for the survival of the people. The model holding the basket is painted up in a hash pattern like the weave of the basket bringing the cleansing to the people.”
