'Inyaroo,' acrylic on linen, 2001

Color plays a major role in one’s aesthetics and enlivens one’s lifestyle. Although some may be scared of it, the creative and kooky set, if you will, cannot live without it. Testament to this is our local artisans’ generous use of vivid palettes. This is manifested in the copious splashes of luminous hues on a painter’s canvases and on installations of multimedia artists, in the eye-popping tints accenting a couturier’s repertoire, and in the intense yet natural dyes that weavers apply in the textiles they produce.

An exhibit shown at the Yuchengco Museum titled ‘Balgo: Contemporary Australian Art from the Balgo Hills’ is one ideal example of how color as well as geometric shapes and patterns rendered and laid out in bright color fields have become integral in the telling and in the preservation of the heritage of the aborigines in Australia. There are 26 paintings and 18 etchings from both senior and emerging Balgo artists in the touring exhibit. They were sourced from a selection of artworks from Australia’s Artbank Collection. Artbank is the Australian Government’s contemporary art rental initiative.

Opulent tones weren’t seen in the works of Australia’s indigenous peoples back in the day, and only ochres and browns saturated their pieces. But interest in new materials and techniques gained approval among Balgo’s artistic set following the success of their fellow Papunya artists. And in 1980, Balgo artists eschewed the traditional and shook things up by coming out with colorful opuses. Their indigenous art therefore became contemporary and modern. Prints, dots, lines, waves, and patterns filled up their paintings, turning them into abstract pieces.

Balgo Hills is a small and remote community located in northeast Western Australia. Halls Creek, the closest town to it, is 300 kilometers away while the state capital of Perth is 1,800 kilometers away. The community stands today in an arid desert country marked by dunes and red earth, warnini (rockholes) and tjurrnu (soakwaters), but it is also a land teeming with salt lake systems and dry spinifex grasses. It is also considered as one of Australia’s most important indigenous art centers.

Artbank senior curator Jackie Dunn wrote that Balgo is “an important place for myth-lines that stem from that land and were laid down during the Tjukurrpa or Dreaming” and is “a site of ritual exchange, where every aspect of the desert has a metaphysical reality.” The concept of ‘Dreaming’ refers to a primitive time when “the world attained form and all animals and plants came into being as the ancestral heroes fashioned the land as they travelled.”

Aborigines believe ‘Dreaming’ to be “both a reality and ever-present” and this is seen in their continuous production of indigenous art. Dunn added, “It is through the Dreaming that a person is linked to his or her country. Dreaming ancestors are incarnated in present-day tribal members in specific geographical areas. Not only does this mean that Tjukurrpa stories, which in turn become paintings, are therefore site-specific but it also reveals how Aboriginal history can be understood as spatial rather than time-based.”

And this is apparent in the cosmic and utterly modern art that Balgo artists paint, which we were surprised to find out, were actually based on sacred places where their journeys took place. Now, we understand that the shapes and patterns seen in their works are representative of the paths they treaded, the landscape features and symbols they passed through in their spiritual finding and mapping of the ‘self.’

In the exhibit, Filipino viewers are treated with ‘Dreaming’ stories of the aborigines. Each painting and etching is distinct from one another as it tells about the heritage and spiritual journey of each artist. Theirs in an art that is both contemporary and ancient. Their works are contemporary because of the colors and modern-world techniques used to create them, and ancient because of the age-old stories behind them. It seems that there’s no stopping these aboriginal artists to preserve it and flourish in it.

“For the artists of Balgo, painting is not a mimetic rendering of a place, but is a social interaction performed through time and space, and in as much iconic as narrative. The icons in Balgo art are more fluid than the signs used by indigenous people from other nearby groups, and often signify several things at once,” Dunn revealed. “A semicircle may represent a windbreak or a hill or a camp or, pinched more into a U shape, may represent the people who gather there.”

Australian Ambassador Rod Smith explained, “The Balgo exhibit offers a riot of color and energy while exploring the stories, lives, and history of the Balgo artists.” He ended, “The exhibition reflects a strong connection the Aboriginal people have with the land and their traditions—a connection which is more than 40,000 years old. Balgo provides an opportunity for Filipinos to learn more about Australia’s Aboriginal heritage and further their understanding of the vital role it plays in Australia’s national identity.”