Teho Ropeyarn and Elisa Jane Carmichael

With rich, multivalent connections to Country and to the media in which they work, Elisa Jane Carmichael and Teho Ropeyarn share a show at Onespace Gallery. Here they exhibit new and recent work, in the glow of recent success at major public exhibitions at national and international scales.

Likenesses are easy to draw between Carmichael and Ropeyarn: both are flourishing in their early-to-mid careers as artmakers, exhibiting in significant group shows across public institutions, and working closely with both Country and community. With Carmichael’s work closing recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s Primavera: Young Australian Artists, and Ropeyarn’s opening at the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, rīvus, Onespace’s exhibition comes at a moment of ascendance for both artists, in which they are amassing increased institutional recognition both within and without the nation.

Carmichael, a Quandamooka woman, works closely with community in a practice which explores and expands around traditional weaving methods. Working with family members including her mother, Sonja Carmichael, she has also collaborated with a broad range of First Nations artists including Judy Watson, with whom she worked on the public installation nerung ballun (Nerang River), freshwater, saltwater, 2021, for the Gold Coast’s spangling HOTA. On this collaborative ethic, Carmichael notes that “The process of working with family and community is grounded in connecting, sharing, and yarning. In this way we are continuing to work across generations to keep our weaving practices strong of alive.” 

Carmichael’s work often involves a multi-directional approach to time and history, combining ancestral methods of weaving with contemporary materials, or recycled fibres. Her work for this exhibition traverses media including cyanotypes, weaving with reeds, dyed fabric, ghost nets and wire, with many of the weaving materials sourced from Country around Minjerribah. Carmichael recounts that “I gather materials like ungaire – our freshwater swamp reed, talwalpin – cotton tree inner bark, shells, fish scales, barks, leaves and materials washed up or found when walking on country. My time spent gathering reeds with family is always very special as these reeds have survived harsh conditions – colonisation, fires, and climate change. The process of working with the reeds connects with the past. I think of this often as I walk country, following the same paths and techniques of our Ancestors.” 

Ropeyarn’s work also emerges from connections to Country and to community, often sitting at the interstices between diverse research methods, exploring their intersections and gaps. Many of his prints are based on oral histories shared with him by community members; a recent turn, however, has also seen him explore anthropological, archival, and other research tactics and the kinds of knowledges they produce. Ropeyarn explains that “I’ve been researching material from the colonial settlement at Somerset, in Cape York, reading books and articles and I’ve come across various anthropological research material conducted in Injinoo on the modern history of my people, especially language. It has helped me to understand recollections of my old people and their knowledge at the time and information that we weren’t privy to, or that our old people never knew about because it was recorded and stored elsewhere before their time.”

A devoted printmaker, Ropeyarn says that “I love the control of the line work and the ability to play with design motifs and the freedom to work different areas of the vinyl block.” His work, indeed, emphasises intricate, vibrational linework, meticulously completed and often at staggering scale. As with Carmichael, Ropeyarn too accounts for his choice of medium through reference to family and community. As he articulates it, his interest in pattern and design was sparked by a cousin and her father, who were both artists, while his engagement with linoprinting, particularly, was nurtured in school. As he tells it, “I created some lino blocks carving and we printed them on paper and shirts and had a school art exhibition which I sold quite a bit. Later on I realised it was a meaningful path and that path to come was important to save oral stories and research more on my Injinoo Aboriginal cultural identity and language, and its history. I have discovered heaps and have preserved those stories, where some are now held in institutions.” 

Connecting the work of both artists, for this show, is an interest in water and water systems – as geopolitical sites, and carriers and conveyors of history, and as barometers of climactic, historical, and cultural change and continuity, by turns. Holding fast to the distinct historical perspectives from which they create their work, Ropeyarn and Carmichael are, here, set within their own stream of exchange, each with the other, as their practices grow and expand outwards and upwards. 

EXHIBITION
Elisa Jane Carmichael and Teho Ropeyarn: Parallel Currents 
11 March – 23 April 2022
Onespace Gallery, Brisbane