Serpent Trails – ‘Art’ video transcript
Voice over
The Line campaign has developed these resources about respectful relationships.
(Interview with Bronwyn Bancroft)
Bronwyn
Art has always been an important part of my life. From the age of six I was involved in doing a lot of creative things basically because I had three elder brothers and three elder sisters so I was left alone a lot. So I just had to explore creative mediums in a way to understand what I wanted to do. And I was good at it, I was good at it.
The one thing that I always remember was the paucity of funds. There was no money. So at the end of the day one of the avenues for which I developed an audience was the local Tenterville show. So I used to submit drawings or paintings to that and I’d win two bucks so I’d probably clean up and get like twelvedollars’ worth of first prize winnings and that would be, that was like an enormous amount of money.
I think the joy of making something from nothing. I think that’s probably been the essential ingredient all the time. You start with just an idea in your mind and what you’re feeling in your heart and your body and from your journey and then you just basically start and create something from virtually nothing and build it up. So that’s always been an exciting moment.
Probably one of the most important lessons you can learn as a younger person is not to take any notice of peer pressure because at the endof the day there are going to be people that haven’t got the ability that you’ve got and so they’re going to be jealous. So they’ll try to cut you for that. And there will be some people that have more talent than you and will be blasé about it and perhaps will not pursue that because they’re good at maths and English and science and art. But if you purely look at art as a way to express yourself, to record moments in your life, to archive those moments, to put them in little books, to scrapbook them, to remember what you were doing when you were eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, is a fantastic sort of monument to your own life and it will only ever build on who you are as a person. So the thing that you’ve got to not allow people to do to you is actually start to say ‘oh that’s not very good’. And one of my biggest lessons, I’ve done a lot of teaching, is that people always say to me, particularly in Aboriginal communities, there’ll be a lack of confidence around their ability to actually represent an image. ‘Oh I can’t draw that pelican’ and it’s like, and they all start by, ‘well I can’t draw a straight line’ and I say ‘well you don’t have to’. A line can be like that or it can be like that.
(Bronwyn drawing squiggly lines in the air with her hand)
So we’ve got to undo all of the things that we’ve been taught, and this is not going to go down well with the teachers, because at the end of the day the stuff that’s taught is purely about conscripting people to do exactly the same thing as everybody else. Whereas this, what I’m talking about, is freedom of expression and knowing who you are through art.
(Cuts to art room where studentsare paintingbackgrounds with the palms of their hands with blue, yellow, red and white paint)
(Cuts back to interview with Bronwyn)
Bronwyn
In the creativeprocess when I actually do workshops with children, generally what I do with young people is that I actually do this thing called ‘get down and get dirty’. So basically I allow them to paint with high quality paint and paper to reproduce what I call an emotional background. So they get their hands dirty, they get to make lots of backgrounds, or emotional backgrounds, and then after that we’ll play with what we’re going to put on top of it. It’s a successful way for people to be able to all finish. One of the key ingredients within my workshops is that nobody gets left behind. Sometimes you’ve got stragglers, people who are really lacking in confidence. You work really hard with them and you let the people that have got more confidence just run ahead. But by the time you finish the workshop they’re all simultaneous, they’ve all got something finished, they’ve all got this great thing of ‘wow, I did that’. It is really about the joy that the person, the individual gets out of it. That that one person gets out of it. The fact that they go ‘I didn’t know I could do that’. It’s enabling, so my workshops are always about enabling people to explore the artistic process
(Cuts back to art room where the students are continuing to paint)
(Cuts back to interview with Bronwyn)
Bronwyn
Touching on how you can actually give enough confidence to a child to actually go ‘I can do this’ – that’s the words you keep saying. ‘You can do this’, ‘this is easy’, ‘this is fun’, ‘this is probably going to be the best part of yourweek this week’. When you’re creating things from your innermost heart and from yourexperiences then that is the moment that the otherpeople…. People may not even understand that but how can you fail? It’s your life. You can’t fail.
(Cuts back to art room where students are continuing to paint)
(Cuts back to interview)
Bronwyn
I remember we just finished doing a workshop last year in Brisbane and it was around sexual abuse and staying safe, or keeping safe and a lot of the children were very tentative about it but it was kind of a very adult moment. And there was one particular boy and all he did was, his safe place was a dam. So we just did this huge brown dam and a big green outside and that was perfect, that was just like the most abstract vision but he finished it, he’d never completed a piece of work at the school, and completed his piece of artwork and it got printed in the book. And he was like ‘oh my god, I finished this work’. And that was his vision. You know, a brown dam that he could sit with and put his hand in and green around it. I mean, to me that’s just glorious interpretation. If you’ve got somebody that’s lacking in confidence, you just spend… I almost disregard everyone else once I’ve gotthem traveling. And then the momentum of the workshop will allow them to carry through. But if I’ve got one or two children that are really lacking in confidence I will just situate myself right there next to them, talk them through it, help them, engage them and before you know it they’re all up to speed. It’s really about just focusing, caring about that particular individual and the group dynamic. And the group dynamic can be obviously quite daunting.
(Cuts back to art room where the students are continuing their paintings)
(Cuts back to the interview with Bronwyn)
Bronwyn
I would say that the language of painting is a totally separate entity in relation to the way that people can express themselves. I would believe that art is another level within our intelligence and a really high level of understanding. If people pursue artistic practice, or even enjoy creating objects or creating something from nothing they’ve got that totalkabout and remember, as opposed to having probably maybe some crummy experiences that they just keep accumulating. Art is a good way to dislodge the crappy things in your life and replace it with something beautiful.
I support one of the most important things to understand in relation to Aboriginal community members actually engaging in artistic professions or work or creating is that there’s no word for ‘art’ in Aboriginal language. So art was always a part of life. Not everyone can dance, I can’t dance and I can’t sing but I can paint. Not everyone can paint but they can dance and they can sing and they can make instruments and they can make fighting sticks and they can carve and they can do ground paintings and they can do installations and they can do video links and they can do YouTube.
We’re less than two per cent of the population and most of us are engaging, the majority of us, are engaging in that creative space. So I think if you understand that there was no separate entity around art being a separate moment then you’d understand that that’s all part of the holistic nature of being Aboriginal today.
(Cuts to showing the finished pieces of artwork by the students)
Voice over
Feeling creative? Check out more ideas at theline.org.au/indigenous
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