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Illiam Nargoodah and Cecilia Umbagai make their mark at NATSIAA

Headshot of Belle Taylor
Belle TaylorThe West Australian
WA Artist Cecilia Umbagai
Camera IconWA Artist Cecilia Umbagai Credit: Supplied

Illiam Nargoodah grew up watching his dad, uncles and grandmother make traditional crafts. “It’s in the blood really,” the young artist says. “Family and where I come from. My uncle used to make artefacts like traditional weapons, and my grandmother made coolamon, like a basket, then during NAIDOC Week we used to make bush artefacts.”

But when this traditional knowledge clashed with contemporary influences, Nargoodah’s own creative practice was born.

“It was after watching the Lord of the Rings movie,” the 23-year old says of his inspiration to start making knives when he was 17. “I just like using my imagination. We have a station across the road and I go for a walk and look for the bits and pieces and the bits of metal. There is plenty there.”

WA Artist Illiam Nargoodah
Camera IconWA Artist Illiam Nargoodah Credit: Supplied

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Nargoodah’s knives have now seen the Fitzroy Crossing man claim a place as a finalist in the prestigious Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, which open in Darwin next week. They are Australia’s top awards for Indigenous artists and WA is strongly represented, with 17 artists making the finals.

And while there are plenty of familiar names on the list — John Prince Siddon and Ben Ward are both finalists — a new, younger generation are also being recognised for exciting new work combining traditional and contemporary influences. NATSIAA curator Luke Scholes says there is an emerging cohort of young artists, led by Nargoodah and another WA artist, Cecilia Umbagai, who are represented in this year’s awards.

“Illiam is a classic example of someone who handcrafts these knives, handcrafting these blades and the handles, and then making a kind of art installation of them really shows the (broadening of) perimeters that most people have in their minds when you say Aboriginal art,” Scholes says. “What most people wouldn’t realise now, is that Aboriginal artists, like most artists around the world, are really willing to work well beyond the traditional mediums of art, of painted canvas.”

While Nargoodah is being credited with revitalising the art of knife-making, Umbagai has been painting on bark.

“You haven’t had a tradition of bark painting out in the Kimberley for some time and now you have young artists like Cecilia who are really interested, and desperate, in a way, to engage in some of those materials as the older people did,” Scholes says. “Those two are really the poster boy and girl, in a way, for the renewal of past traditions.”

Those two are really the poster boy and girl, in a way, for the renewal of past traditions.

Luke Scholes

“It’s so different to working with paints and acrylic on canvas,” she says. “I have noticed that when I paint with the ochre it gives me more of a sense of how I feel. I kinda go back into a zone where I am out bush.”

Umbagai is a Worrorra woman and lives in the Mowanjum community, near Derby. The Worrorra people have a belief in the Wandjina, spiritual beings who created the Earth and the plants and animals that inhabit it. Much of Umbagai’s work is inspired by the Wandjina and she says her aim is to use art to share her knowledge of the spiritual being with a wider audience.

“I want to explain to the world, there is a lot of stuff behind the Wandjina, it’s not just a weird figure everyone sees,” she says.

“A lot of people think it’s an alien most of the time.

“They don’t really get to know what the real story behind them is.

Work by Cecilia Umbagai, Wandjina the Rainmaker. 2019, Ochre on canvas
Camera IconWork by Cecilia Umbagai, Wandjina the Rainmaker. 2019, Ochre on canvas Credit: Supplied

“Some people come in and they see the Wandjina and they get spooked out because they see the big eyes or the weird-shaped nose and I guess by just putting them more out there, people understand them and don’t think they are scary and don’t think they are aliens.

“They are part of our culture and part of our understanding of life.”

Umbagai says her inclusion in the awards has been an “awesome experience”, and is part of her broader ambitions to take her art from the West Kimberley to the wider world.

“I’ve always wanted to be in the Telstra awards because having a lot of my family being in and out of the awards, I feel like I am doing something with myself,” she says.

“I just want to be more out there.”

The winners of the NATSIAA will be announced on August 8.

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