Creeks, Claypans, and Wildflowers: Sonya Edney's Dreamtime Visions of Yingarrda Country.

By Elle Borissow

Undeniably magnetic in their pictorial vitality, Yingarrda-Wadjarri Aboriginal artist Sonya Edney’s narrative landscapes speak to the indigenous ancestral culture of a specific geographic locale, centred around the life-giving waterways of the Gascoyne region of Western Australia – also known as, Yingarrda Country.

Radiant in their powerful swathes of colour, Edney’s paintings synthesise Aboriginal creation narratives with Dreamtime stories, and regional botanical influences. Her rendering of Country can also be seen contending with complex conceptions of temporality, at once grounded by a deep history of ancestral Aboriginal tradition, and simultaneously, relating to her present day personal life within the Burringurrah community, where she has chosen to pursue a relationship with the contemporary international art world.

Often fusing sky and land in subject, Edney’s work invites us to feel the vibrational magnificence of the landscape. Her process, she says, “always starting with the light,” wherefrom she layers pigments intuitively drawing inspiration from memories, dreams, local wildlife, and Yingarrda aural histories to depict local Gascoyne land formations. Arid, dry and dusty; the climate of Western Australia is home to a plethora of plant species necessarily adapted to drought. Wildflowers, colloquially named “the ephemerals,” only bloom during occasional seasons of plenty; the banks of wateringholes, creeks, and claypans symbiotically extending a lifeline to their floral counterparts, which explode ceremonially in wildly vibrant colour when able. Transient by nature, these wildflower displays are like nature’s fireworks, in celebration of a favourable year. Edney’s pictorial memory of this lush phenomenon is a product of her intensely sentient “feeling” of colour and can be seen likewise in celebration of her Country, evoking a cosmic ancestral connection with place. When describing her intuitive visionary process of creation in an interview, Edney reflects, “I just dream about these colours and then as these visualise in my mind […] It just comes to me.” The extraordinary energy she paints with, “runs through [her] veins.”

Figure 1: Sonya Edney, Little Creek, c.2021-2023, acrylic on canvas, 130 x 95cm. Image courtesy of Japingka Aboriginal Art Gallery, Perth.

A creek itself functions much like a vein of the land’s own body. The Little Creek (fig. 1, c. 2021-2023) depicts one of the thirty-six tributaries which bring water to the Gascoyne region, and relates as a narrative motif to the Aboriginal creation story of Yingarrda Country. In her depictions of the waterways carved into the land’s surface, Edney relays the narrative of an ancestral young man named Burringurrah, who “ran away from Aboriginal law.” Chased down, and punished for his flight by a spear to the leg, whilst he was running away, Burringurrah “dragged his fighting stick along the ground,” which is said to have formed the rivers and the creeks of the upper Gascoyne. Marked by the delineation of the creek, Edney’s composition recalls Burringurrah’s carving of the land. Considering her contemporary painting as an act of ancestral memory, Edney’s process of dreaming is important in the formation and activation of her artistic process. The bird’s eye view she adopts is fittingly revealing, and disorientating: its versatility, evoking a celestial spiritual energy, in addition to the red earth of the terrestrial realm. Cooly jade, in its milky swathes of pastel green, the Little Creek’s ancestrally animate subject speaks as much to a belt of cosmic energy like the milky way as it is is representative of a local body of water: its flow, undulating, and underlined by purple banks and orange-red bands of sand, powerfully relaying both creation narrative, and geographic place. In essence, the artist captures an emotional, and spiritual energetic signature of this location in her dreamlike aerial composition; her style and colour palette, coalescing in harmony with her ancestral creation story and childhood experience in the bush. Other works take the night sky as their subject more explicitly, her depictions of the Seven Sisters motif and other spiritually significant constellations, recalling this celestial/terrestrial link.

Having chosen to create her art for an open audience, Edney boldly takes her place on the international art stage. Contra to the historical (and ongoing) normative art practices within Aboriginal culture, where image making and comprehension is strictly reserved for private sacred ceremony, Edney’s art defies singular interpretation in her comparative openness. It is important to note that although its animated spiritual nature seems energetically apparent, her stylised mark making and non-naturalistic chromatic choices function as a formal ‘disguise’ of sorts. The full spiritual and cultural meaning of her pictures, remain partially concealed by her image making technique, using layering of dots of colour. This style of mark making varies across Aboriginal art within different cultural groups, but functions similarly across disparate regions to conceal the full spiritual, ceremonial, and social meanings of the art (its being reserved for full comprehension by community elders exclusively). Patrick Waterhouse has discussed this phenomenon of privacy in terms of “Restricted Images,” in relation to his photographic series made in collaboration with members of the Warlpiri Aborigines of Central Australia.

Figure 2: Sonya Edney, Freshwater Creek, c.2021-2023, acrylic on canvas, 138 x 130 cm. Image courtesy of Japingka Aboriginal Art Gallery, Perth.

Edney’s art has found phenomenal success on the art market, hosting four sell-out solo exhibitions since 2019. For her rapid success, she accredits a ‘universalisable essence’ in her mode of communication; that is to say you can feel the spiritual reverberations of her art instinctively upon its encounter, despite posessing only limited undersanding of its full meaning. Chromatically, her vibrant rendering of the creek motif could also be said take on a botanical significance in addition to its spiritual importance. If we instead considered the compositions not as aerial perceptions, but as the surface of the wildflowers themselves; Edney’s chromatic and formal choices could be said to depict a delicate symbiotic relationship between the wildflowers and the creek on deeper environmental level. Devoid of any definite perspective, both Little Creek and Freshwater Creek (fig. 2, c.2021-2024) function equally well at a microscopic level as they do if thought of as macrocosms. This sense of unity, illustrating the shared universal nature of the lanscape as a cosmologically animate entity. Energetically shifting, if we zoom closer, imagining instead the closely cropped textural surface of several native wildflowers, Edney’s chromatic compositions recall the microscopic frons of the Pom Pom herb [Ptilotus Manglesii] in violet-magenta and creamy yellow; and the Scarlet Honeymyrtle with its yellow orbs of pollen amidst a sea of crimson. Or, perhaps, you see the pink and orange striped follicles of the Baxter’s Banksia [Banksia Baxteri], or the Kangaroo Paw [Anigozanthos Manglesii], which is Western Australia’s floral emblem in emerald and cerise. The swathes of red earth mutate through this symbiotic metaphor into minute hairs and pollen sacs; and creeks become xylem or phloem, transporting vitality to the landscape itself.

The symbolic significance of the creek, as a culturally meaningful motif, is intended to only be underlined by this symbiotic analogy - the essence of the land, being composed chromatically and formally of the same ‘essence,’ the same earth, the same water, and forming the same Country as the wildflowers it brings life to. The creek, as the literal watery-lifeblood, and the metaphorical ancestral-blood of Burringurrah, is but one aspect of how Edney embeds animism in her depictions of the waterways of the Gascoyne region, offering her Aboriginal insight to the formation of Australia as a bio-diverse landform.

Edney’s style, colour palette, and pictorial structures are integrally built upon Yingarrda Aboriginal tradition, indigenous stewardship and intergenerational local knowledge, and notions of place – the momentum and flow of her compositions often signifying “specific” moments from her journeys across the Western Desert. Within this context, as a contemporary indigenous artist, Edney confidently imposes her own energetic style on the stories she has inherited from Aboriginal aural tradition - among which her primary subject, the repeated motif of creeks, waterholes [claypans], and their reciprocal relationship to blooming wildflowers, retells the creation narrative of the young man Burringurrah. The Burringurrah creation narrative is locally specific to the Yingarrda group, and hence is a central theme in her depiction of the Gascoyne. Her artworks, in their intimate observation, compounding of generational knowledge and visionary channelling of the West Australian landscape are therefore essentially infused with spiritual, ancestral, and emotional significance.

In Sonya Edney’s own words, “it’s my dream, it’s my story, it’s my journey.” In the wet season, “when the warnah buna [thunderstorm] comes, it fills up the rivers and creeks, floods the dry land and starts the wildflowers blooming across the country.” The waterways she depicts bring life to the land, just as her artwork - animated by her Aboriginal ancestry - enriches Australia’s art scene. Her latest exhibition, Burringurrah Dreaming at the Japingka Aboriginal Art Gallery in Fremantle, is now on (September 2024--present).

Bibliography:

Breeden, Stan and Kaasia. Wildflower Country: Discovering Biodiversity in Australia’s Southwest. Fremantle Press, 2010.

Caruana, Wally. “The Bridge: A Brief History of Modern Aboriginal Art.” In Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art. Edited by Pamela McClusky, Wally Caruana, Lisa Graziose Corrin, and Stephen Gilchrist. Yale University Press: Seattle Art Museum, 2012.

Edney, Sonya. “Sonya Edney & the Beginning of Something Bigger.” Interview by Japingka Aboriginal Art Gallery. Japingka Aboriginal Art. Accessed 17/11/2024. https://japingkaaboriginalart.com/articles/sonya-edney-the-beginning-of-something-bigger/

Japingka Aboriginal Art Webpage. “My Journey Through Ingarrda Country.” Accessed 17/11/2024. https://japingkaaboriginalart.com/collections/my-journey-through-ingarrda-country/

Japingka Aboriginal Art Webpage. “Sonya Edney – Yingarrda Waterholes and Wildflowers.” Accessed 17/11/2024. https://japingkaaboriginalart.com/articles/sonya-edney-yingarrda-waterholes-and-wildflowers/

Japingka Aboriginal Art Webpage. “Sonya Edney Artist Profile.” Accessed 17/11/2024.  https://japingkaaboriginalart.com/sonya-edney-artist-profile/

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Mclean, Ian. Double Nation: A History of Australian Art. Reaktion Books, 2023.

SBS Episode, “Our Stories: Connecting with Country.” Accessed 17/11/2024 https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/our-stories/season-6/our-stories-connecting-with-country-s6-ep2/2339108931656

Waterhouse, Patrick. RESTRICTED IMAGES: Made with the Warlpiri of Central Australia. SPBH Editions, 2018.