Jonathan Jones, domestic lean-to 2008
aluminium, fluorescent tubes and fittings, tarpaulin.
© the artist, courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney.
Throughout Australia’s history there have been moments between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, meetings based on great insight, humility and understanding, and these encounters often challenge the stereotypical Australian relations. The relationship between Woollarawarre Bennelong and Arthur Phillip, the colony’s first Governor, is one of the earliest examples, with Bennelong skilfully ‘adopting’ Phillip into his kinship system, calling him 'beanga', or father. In return Phillip called Bennelong ‘son’ and in 1792 Bennelong accompanied Phillip back to England. Other examples of moments and meetings include Trugernanner, or Truganini, and George Augustus Robinson; Maw and Donald Thompson; Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Geffery Bardon; and sometime these relationships go beyond the individual, where leaders connect with the community. People like William Barak, Vincent Lingiari and Charles Perkins became pillars of support – a position and form recreated in lean-to. Two independent forms, gently leaning towards each other, just touching and supporting each other, create a moment.
The use of tarpaulin as material draws on the idea of protection and concealment. It is a material widely used in a state of emergence or as part of an itinerant lifestyle, and so evokes the current political situation for many Indigenous Australians in terms of the ongoing colonial displacement of Aboriginal people from their country to the current intervention policy. Fluorescent lights underpin the tarpaulin creating positive and negative forms within the structures that reference the traditional line markings of south-east Australia, often made on carved trees, weapons and possum skin cloaks, and continued in the work of 19th Century artists Tommy McRae and William Barak. The lights and the structures play between the individual and the community, the private and the public, creating not only a light map but a symbiotic form, where one sole light cannot make a pattern, but a pattern cannot be made without that sole light. This form relates back to the idea/concept of lean-to, that what forms people, our perceptions of them, what they stand for is not only themselves but their interaction with the wider community
The use of tarpaulin as material draws on the idea of protection and concealment. It is a material widely used in a state of emergence or as part of an itinerant lifestyle, and so evokes the current political situation for many Indigenous Australians in terms of the ongoing colonial displacement of Aboriginal people from their country to the current intervention policy. Fluorescent lights underpin the tarpaulin creating positive and negative forms within the structures that reference the traditional line markings of south-east Australia, often made on carved trees, weapons and possum skin cloaks, and continued in the work of 19th Century artists Tommy McRae and William Barak. The lights and the structures play between the individual and the community, the private and the public, creating not only a light map but a symbiotic form, where one sole light cannot make a pattern, but a pattern cannot be made without that sole light. This form relates back to the idea/concept of lean-to, that what forms people, our perceptions of them, what they stand for is not only themselves but their interaction with the wider community
artist statement 2011
Jonathan Jones is represented by gallery barry keldoulis
