Each morning, soft sculpture artist Marlene Rubuntja takes a short walk with her sun-dazed dogs to the place that changed her life: Yarrenyty Arltere art centre, in the middle of the desert.
Nestled next to the Larapinta Valley town camp where she lives, a short drive from Alice Springs, the Indigenous-run centre comprises a low-slung brick complex and a collection of demountables, painted with earthy tones and murals that blend into the formidable MacDonnell Ranges behind it.
When we meet there in October it’s dry and dusty, the hot sun streaming from a spotless blue sky. Rubuntja sits at a table outside the workroom as young children whip around us like a gale.
The centre was founded in 2000 as a response to social issues that were plaguing the town camp and putting its residents at risk, and since then it’s been about more than just its award-winning art: it’s been about healing, learning and community, and a safe space for the children.
And without it, Rubuntja tells me, she’d have “nowhere to go”.
Inside the work room, Arrernte artists Rhonda Sharpe, Dulcie Ragget, Dulcie Sharpe, Roxane Petrick and Cornelius Ebatarinja are chatting quietly, bent over oddly-shaped upholstered canvases which they’re embroidering with curved needles in vivid coloured threads. This painstaking work will become Victoria Amazonica: an eight-metre dome and meeting place, and the first piece visitors encounter at the National Gallery of Victoria’s inaugural Triennial, an unprecedented art and design show that opened in December.
The large-scale commission has been a year-long collaboration between the art centre, Alice Springs designer Elliat Rich and her partner James Young, and Brazilian design powerhouse Estudio Campana, run by brothers Humberto and Fernando Campana. The Campanas sketched out the overall concept and colour palette for the piece (it is named for a water lily, and themed to water), chose the art centre they wanted to work with after a visit from Humberto, and left the finer details to the artists.
Standing underneath the finished dome and staring up, the 40 separate panels, embroidered by 13 Yarrenyty Arltere artists in total, depict landscapes and stories specific to the region: there are waterholes and grasslands, rain and rivers, bush medicine and birds in flight. It’s the kind of piece you could stare at for hours without seeing everything.
In a statement accompanying the work, the artists wrote: “At first we couldn’t think in our heads what all the water from Humberto’s place could look like. So we just thought about what we know ...
“We keep thinking about how the desert gets so thirsty for water, it’s just calling out for the rain to come and fill it up. Then it rains, and all the life that comes, you can see the waterholes. You can see bush tucker and bush medicine, flowers of all colours, grasses. It’s so beautiful.”
These stories of regeneration that fly across the canvases can be read as a metaphor for the community itself.
In the 1990s, the Larapinta Valley town camp was considered one of the most dangerous places in Alice Springs, plagued by extreme poverty, alcoholism, health issues, drug use, overcrowding and violence. There was little access to work or education, and children as young as five were sniffing glue and spray paint.
“All it was is rubbish,” Rubuntja says. “I see backward at what I’ve been doing, and it makes me want to cry.”
The community came up with a solution: a centre where adults could come to train in art-making, and where their children could learn, and be safe, in the classroom next door. The learning centre was funded by the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, but the space would also function as a community hub where families could access the social services, childcare and case workers administered by the Tangentyere Council, the Indigenous-owned and operated peak body of the 18 town camps in the area.
In 2008, the Batchelor funding ran out, and the centre became a social enterprise; Sophie Wallace, who had been working remotely as a teacher, was employed as arts centre coordinator. By then, the town camp’s turnaround had already been huge.
“The kids were able to be mainstreamed, the sniffing had died down … they were engaged, they were healthy,” Wallace says. “When I first came in, you could feel that strength in the community; [the artists] really felt that this place was their place, and that they wanted to support it.
“People are still traumatised. There was still a lot of alcohol abuse – I mean, there still is – and lots of violence. So they still needed a place just to come and be safe, to unwind. But at the same time, they wanted to make some money from it.”
Indigenous arts centres tend to specialise in a particular artform, and for Yarrenyty Arltere it became soft sculptures: vibrant, playful pieces made from coloured wool embroidered on naturally dyed blanket. Their figures, animals, jewellery and stories have twice won the 3D category of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art awards, and are represented in major collections around the country.
For artists such as Rubuntja, who won the inaugural $15,000 Vincent Lingiari Art award in 2016, the centre was life-changing.
“I love art. Art is in my heart. It changed me,” she says. She has lost family members to alcohol addiction, and has told Wallace she “gave up grog for art”.
“If I kept contact with what I did, I would destroy my life, and I would destroy my family,” Rubuntja tells me. “But me, I came here and found this place … Art makes me feel better. When new generations start doing sewing and all that, it makes me happy. But when I go to town, I’m sad … I see them but, ‘I can’t stop you, it’s your life’.”
Wallace says there are others with similar stories: “It’s really been a place for people to give up grog. That’s been huge.”
A large-scale, long-term cross-cultural collaboration is a tricky thing to pull together – particularly when it involves people as geographically, linguistically and culturally disparate as the globally renowned Campana brothers in Brazil, and a little-known Indigenous community still recovering from the traumatic after-effects of colonialism and, more recently, the NT intervention.
But Wallace says this project has been a “pretty proud moment” for the centre, in an industry that doesn’t always get it right.
“It’s easy to dine out on having Aboriginal artists working in ‘collaboration’, you know, when it’s not really a collaboration,” she says. “But [in this case] it feels like that’s what it’s become. A big part of that is thanks to Elliat Rich.”
Rich is an Alice Springs-based designer whose work featured at the Australian pavilion of 2016’s Venice Architecture Biennale. With her partner, James Young, she runs Elbowrkshp, an acclaimed studio in the arts and design precinct of Alice Springs which has become known for facilitating opportunities for work and collaboration in the region.
For the NGV commission, Rich and Young acted as the conduit between the gallery, the Swedish designers, the arts centre, and the Indigenous-run Centre for Appropriate Technology (CAT) – an Alice Springs-based enterprise that made the sculpture’s steel frame.
“There was a really conscious effort to give the artists the space they wanted, and not determine what they could actually do with it,” she says. “They are the artists, and we are literally just providing the canvas.”
Rich, who has been involved in local arts since she moved to Alice Springs in 2004, believes centres such as Yarrenyty Arltere prove that for communities still traumatised by colonisation, solutions are best when they come from within.
“Any kind of structure that allows Aboriginal people to advocate for themselves – it’s as simple as that. That’s what needs to happen,” she says. “That the people be responsible for themselves and their families, rather than other people making those decisions for them.
“And art is one of the ways that [Indigenous] people can currently make an income, and actually do work that’s meaningful to them.”
• The NGV Triennial runs until 15 April 2018
