THE OTHER SIDE | Emily McCulloch Childs
This exhibition comprises works by leading contemporary jeweller and educator Melinda Young and me - two of "the other side" workers of the Indigenous Jewellery Project, that I founded. Following are my thoughts on the works and observations of the Countries we have been privileged to be immersed in while conducting workshops in Aboriginal communities since 2015.
1. Rings
I have always been fascinated by rings.
My grandmother, the actor, model, writer, business woman and activist, stage name Ella Bromley, (later Ellen Moscovitz, then Ellen McCulloch) had an incredible collection of fashion and jewellery, much of it bespoke, from when she had lived in the US in the 1930s and 40s.
She had an original Astrid Fog George Jensen ring, a pill box ring she kept her pills in, I was fascinated by its clean silver lines and hinge mechanism, and use. She said women used to keep such rings to deal with abusive husbands with poisoning. This fascinated and mystified me as a child; there was a secret women’s knowledge of resistance, it was dark and macabre, but also told of survival and strength.
Women’s resistance is inextricably linked to jewellery. These beautiful objects serve more purpose than just pretty baubles and mere decoration. They serve a social function, a political one, and tell a tale of resistance, that lies hidden beneath the surface of society.
I used my grandmother’s lipstick holder necklace, silver with a solitary sapphire mechanism that slid the stick of make up up and down. It looked like a mere pendant, I used it throughout the 90s. It didn’t hold much, but it worked perfectly. No one knew its use, for lipstick or for substances: like the pillbox rings, its use was unknown to the men on the door.
It would be worn in plain sight, it sat front and centre in the middle of my chest; its beauty was its disguise.
Years later I would use rings as self defence at crowded gigs. They worked perfectly.
2. My jewels are my children
‘I haven't married. So, I am the opposite of the woman that said: “My children are my jewels”. My jewels — my children — are the objects I try to make beautifully and to express a feeling’.
Emily Hope
I was named after two Emilys: a writer, and a jeweller/writer, poet’s daughter.
Emily Bronte and Emily Hope.
Emily Hope was a family friend, her father, the poet A.D Hope, was part of the group of writers and artists who created Meanjin, along with my grandfather. Emily, along with Margaret Goldthorpe, became the first women to enrol full time into the gold and silversmithing course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), in 1958. She made a ring for my mother’s 21st birthday, using silver and a garnet from my grandfather’s tie pin.
The ring has little Perceval like faces in it, it is sculptural, deep, rich and beautiful, like the garnet.
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The first skill Mel Young teaches in our Indigenous Jewellery Project silversmithing workshops: how to make a ring.
I never thought I would be able to make a ring. Like most jewellery, it seemed to be an incredible out of reach technical skillset, unobtainable. Of all the visual arts, I have always loved the most hand made, tactile. Ceramics, printmaking were my favourite, drawing and painting often eluded and frustrated me.
I like the sensation and satisfaction of moulding with my fingers, it recalls the direct finger work of my first instrument piano, the piano bench is where I spent a large part of my childhood, endlessly training my stubborn fingers in classical discipline.
My grandfather was a wood whittler, he taught me how to carve, as much as how to saw and chop, and build shelter in wood. My grandparents had a pine forest as their back up income, attempting to supplement meagre art salaries. Carving in wax reminds me of wood carving, and I see it in the artists I work with across Australia, whose cultures taught them wood carving from infancy.
I first learnt to make rings in a small Aboriginal community in the Western Desert. I was running an Indigenous Jewellery Project workshop there with Kate Rohde, who is primarily known for her incredible, fantastical and intricate resin sculptures. Like metals, much of which is originally made in wax, resin is made first in plasticine or clay. It is less hard carving then soft moulding, like ceramics.
Kate and I had run a resin jewellery workshop at Ernabella Arts, then driven through magical Country, past Areyonga, and marvelled at the giant coolamon fallen from the sky, through sunset with dingos, to Ikuntji, Haasts Bluff, a Luritja community, a place that sits in the nexus of Papunya and Walungurru, where the Luritja Pintupi first arrived into the twentieth century British colonisation, German mission.
During the evenings of our workshops, Kate had been doing something in the corner with fire. I finally asked her what she was doing, and she said making rings for an upcoming exhibition with her gallery, Pieces of Eight.
It was winter and bitterly cold, on a bleak overcast Saturday, we were supposed to be going hunting with the artists of Ikuntji, but everyone was too cold. Kate began her ring making, in the living room of the large collection of dongas we were staying in with a revolving cast of tradies who were building houses. The art centre had an artist in residence, and we were both intrigued by this ring making, and asked Kate if she would teach us. She did, generously allowing me to copy her rings, faceted crystal designs in the wax to be cast in silver, in order to learn.
I loved the wax, the fire, the carving. That weekend I made nine rings. I was entranced, obsessed. It felt like I had found a language that made me feel at home in my body and my mind, that I could create something with my hands that spoke something I couldn’t articulate in words. This must be how artists must feel when they can draw easily, I thought. I no longer envied their natural skills.
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3. Spirits
Spirits invariably appear in my art when I am making it. Most of my art making is intuitive and unconscious. I am a vessel for something that comes up from the earth, the ether, and moves through me into the paint or wax. This is why painting freaks me out and I don’t do it too often.
The spirits in wax first began appearing when Mel and I were doing Indigenous Jewellery Project workshops in the Torres Strait Islands. A strong, wonderful, beautiful place. We went to visit the historic cemetery, which has areas of great importance: a Chinese cemetery, the shrine to the designer of the Torres Strait Islander flag, Bernard Namok.
I saw a black snake moving on one of the graves, the next day I asked the artists about it. ‘Were you wearing that necklace?’ asked Rosaline Tomasina, herself an accomplished workshop teacher with a roving studio set up. The necklace was the Dhonyin, Rainbow Serpent silver necklace made by Marrnyula Mununggurr in our IJP workshops at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka, NE Arnhem Land. Dhonyin is one of the three manifestations of the Rainbow Serpent, and a transformative ceremony of initiation, and was the Yolngu name Marrnyula had given me.
I had been indeed wearing the Dhonyin necklace. ‘That’s our totem, that Black Python.’ said Rosaline. ‘It was welcoming you here, it’s a good omen.’
There were men performing ceremony in a closed off area somewhere on the island. I could hear them from my hotel room, drumming and singing, as I sat making waxes. When they dried, they were little men: the men in the cemetery.
I have undertaken most of the jewellery workshops IJP has done with Mel, learning silversmithing techniques mostly, but also many other elements: how to paint on metal, how to think about design, the body, ideas, materials. Mel has taught me how to see the world in a different way, now when I go on walks in the bush and the beach I am constantly noticing, observing. I pick up pieces of metal and plastic. I see everything as jewellery. Her teaching has enabled me to work with my hands, when I am upset, frustrated, or delighted with the world or my emotions, I create works for the body or objects with my hands.
The Indigenous Jewellery Project did a residency at ANU School of Art & Design, Jewellery & Object Studio, through Craft & Design Canberra. I was curator & writer in residence, I arrived before the jewellers, in winter, and spent a long weekend by myself in the large Bauhaus building, in the artists flat off the textile studio. I made waxes, rings mostly and brooches. At one point in the night I heard some artists arriving into the flat next door. Looking forward to meeting them in the morning, I went over to them but the flats were empty.
The spirits of the many artists who’ve stayed and worked there came out in those works.
During those workshops I learnt silversmithing techniques with Mel and with Alison Jackson. This has informed my necklaces.
We did another residency there, with the addition of Emily Beckley from the Torres Straits flying in. Driving to Canberra from my south south eastern home, I write this poem:
Gurnai Country Lang Lang Drouin. Telephone road Cordelia Mosquito creek Coalville road Yallourn Gunn's Gully
Overdimensional truck route Leongatha Coal mine Traralgon Closed still
I see the scars on the land
By the Morwell National Park Oh Maryvale Loy yang By the car lots on the highway The comfort inn Walhalla Strezlecki Maffra
Along the Princes Over bloody carcass Of roo and wallaby To the Great Alpine Highway A white cockatoo A wedge tailed eagle A peregrine
Falcon
And oh The Australian Sun
543 ks to go Blind Joe’s Creek The Correctional centre Settlement Road Juxtaposition Of Harold Thomas's flag
And police The pink courthouse The Billabong Emu Creek Old Man Hill Road Dirty Creek Road Fairy Dell Lucknow Bruthen Omeo Tambo
Lambourines Break Fire trails Blackened eucalypts Regrowth Circle Break Track Snowy Mountains Smoky Creek Serpentine Road
Axe Mans Track Up to Eden Beautiful majestic home Of the whale slaughters Where the orcas learnt to survive By leading other whales
Towards the human killer's harpoons How nature learns to survive We throw others to be murdered To save ourselves
Into the forest Of Campo I will retreat And gain new energy From the land And then I'll move again to patriarchal royalty
Highways From a Prince To a King
Into my nation’s capital An invented place Walter Burley did his best To make design
A place built on compromise Half way between the great cities Gold rush to the south Australia's jewelled glistening whore to the north
A place no one but us has heard of And there I will work With metal and fire With the descendants Of the oldest people of this scarred
Sacred land.
Sovereignty was never ceded.