Campfire Group studios and projects, located at Fire-Works gallery in Brisbane, has been operating since 1990. Originally set up by artists Michael Eather, Marshall Bell, Richard Bell, Laurie Nilsen and Joanne Currie, Campfire has focussed on fusing contemporary indigenous art and ideals with western disciplines to create new works & coordinate collaborative projects, but, more importantly, initiate dialogue between Indigenous and non indigenous artists, writers and agencies.

    Many of these collaborations and commissions have stretched between Brisbane and Alice Springs, Cairns and Maningrida. Between ‘Urban’, ‘Tribal’ and ‘White’ artists. Many of these works were completed or conceived in a series of workshops in the Brisbane studio base and also in remote locations at Cairns, Papunya, Kintore or Alice Springs in the last two years.

    For many art collectors, it remains a mystery how and why certain artworks by leading Aboriginal artists regularly appear in different locations within the market place. Generally, works are either commissioned in advance, or they are purchased/consigned to galleries by agencies and art-centres after completion. The commissioning process can be a sensitive subject and poses challenges for galleries, art-centres, curators, collectors as well as the artists. Opinions catapult between numerous cultural perspectives and the associated issues - moral, artistic and financial - including notions of exploitation, quality control and dealer rivalry, to that of self-determination, market and family pressures and the artistic freedom of the individual.

    There isn’t one definitive explanation for this situation, suffice to say that when Aboriginal artists’ want to paint, they generally find the ways and means to do so. In terms of this exhibition, there has been some effort towards selecting works that sit outside the rank and file of mainstream ‘Aboriginal Art’ displays and exhibitions.

    For example Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, who originally began painting with Papunya Tula Artists nearly thirty years ago, has also painted for selected private agencies and galleries for over ten years. He gladly continues all these relationships concurrently, and on his own terms. Likewise Minnie Pwerle from The Eastern desert Utopia region paints largely in Alice Springs, will deal with five or six galleries and agencies concurrently, maintaining a veritable avalanche of work that pervades art galleries all over the country. Still, Minnie calls the shots and continues to be in high demand. 

    Whilst the demand and appreciation of Aboriginal art, particularly from desert communities, has increased dramatically over the years there are ramifications for all art enthusiasts. The political situation and social responsibilities of Aboriginal people often generate a reflex action to paint. Many are simply bread and butter works. Some paintings look tired and seem uninspired. Still, artists willingly paint these, both in town and country, and Ronnie, Minnie and Michael Nelson Jagamara like many other big name artists, are party to this at times. However, these artists consistently demonstrate the ability to reach beyond this when given the opportunity.

    Most Aboriginal painters begin with describing their place in a wider cultural context. This includes special sites and locations within their ‘country’, or their intrinsic relationships and obligations to law and kin etc. But perhaps not all painters should be considered artists? In these recent commissioned works there is a classic sense of all these artist’s ability to experiment outside conventional parameters and take their work to a different level.

    Amidst the intricate framework of such complex social and cultural issues, the paintings certainly speak for themselves.

As Simon Wright has written about Michael Nelson Jagamara in the forthcoming Campfire Group anthology: 

“Today the celebrated success of indigenous art in this country is, in part, precisely by virtue of an anxious coupling with Western counterparts or styles like abstract expressionism and postmodernism. It is pertinent, perhaps, that someone like Jagamara can work outside these traditions, and in traditions of his own, and is able to generate such debate, particularly if we accept the absorptive capacity of settler culture to subtly disarm or absorb such strategies. In turn, it has raised questions of how metropolitan modes of representation are received and appropriated at the periphery, and serves to remind us of the ways in which the periphery may then determine aspects of the metropolis.” 1.

    Queensland Queensland Indigenous Artists have a reputation of often producing barbed if not politically loaded works. Given the social and cultural histories of Indigenous people in the state, it has been the successful artists who have crossed the lines and used their art for advancement, empowerment and survival. Indeed, Queensland Indigenous survival stories account for a large percentage of the artwork at Campfire.

    Joanne Currie has been painting for over 17 years, continually refers to images and designs based on the Maranoa region, her birthplace. Joanne grew up at the Yumba, an Aboriginal mission, on the banks of the Maranoa River near Mitchell, 800km west of Brisbane. Her designs allude to the life-force of the river itself but often more subtly to the patterns inscribed into Maranoa Shield designs of her people - relics of tribal history and a culture almost absorbed into a rural isolation.

    Ian Waldron works with the image of the Bloodwood Tree, a totem for his Kurtjar people in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Waldron was born near Normanton , Far North Queensland, and worked in various industries before studying Visual Arts at the Northern Territory University in the mid 1990s.

“For many generations the artist's male relatives had been employed on cattle stations on their country.  As a child Ian visited family on the stations, watching the men on horseback with respect and admiration.  Most of "traditional" life had died generations ago, but Kurtjar people had stubbornly stayed, working their land on horseback… Many of his works remain prime examples of the artist's ability to portray both the mysterious depth - that is a mourning for secret rights of passage, lost to their own people - and an audacious pride in the extraordinary strength and talent of his people in post-"traditional" life. “

    He now lives and works in Cairns, and makes paintings and installation works largely working with the image of the Bloodwood Tree a totemic  design for both futures and past.

    Vincent Serico, aged now in his sixties, has been painting all his life. Serico describes the lifestyle changes that have affected Indigenous people, carefully describing actual Queensland sites and events of significance, within a complex and hybrid visual language. Serico uses Aboriginal design amidst western pictorial devices that examine a peculiar indigenous perspective that like Waldron neither commits to the past or the future, moreso leaves us in a no mans land.