To celebrate the arrival of the 2009 AFL Finals Series, Mossenson Galleries is pleased to present a new exhibition of football paintings and carvings by one of Australia’s most dynamic artistic families. Hailing from the remote eastern desert region of Utopia, Josie Kunoth Petyarre and Dinni Kunoth Kemarre are two of the leading chroniclers of the national game.

Bush football in central Australia is an idiosyncratically hybrid pursuit, in which the passionate involvement of the local community is set off against the players donning the uniforms and insignia of some the AFL’s most prominent teams; thus we have the Arlparra Dockers, the Mulga Bore Magpies, the Soapy Bore Crows, the Mount Liebig Saints and the Arnkewenyerra Swans. It is in this carnival spirit, one of passionate involvement and inclusion, that husband-and-wife artist team Dinni Kunoth Kemarre and Josie Kunoth Kemarre work.

In 2007 Josie and Dinni were invited to create an installation for the AFL Hall of Fame in Melbourne. Their resultant exhibition Centre Bounce, featuring 16 wooden sculptures representing each of the AFL teams, was received to wide acclaim. Visiting Melbourne for the first time, Dinni and Josie were exhilarated by their eye-opening experience of the city. They proceeded to produce an astonishing collection of paintings of Melbourne, many of them laid out in a characteristic desert painting schema, depicting landmarks and icons of the city. Prominently featured in all of them was the MCG, which Dinni and Josie had visited as guests of the AFL, watching the Saints play the Demons in the first round of the 2007 season.

In 2008 they were invited to participate in the inaugural Basil Sellers Art Prize, a $100,000 award devoted to the representation of sport in art. The work the Kunoths exhibited – an installation combining sculptures of footballers and paintings of the MCG-dominated Melbourne cityscape – stood out as unlike anything else in the show. Writing in Art Monthly Australia, distinguished art critic Christopher Heathcote declared Dinni and Josie’s joint entry of paintings and sculptures ‘the making of the exhibition’: the work wasn’t just brimming with maximum enthusiasm, this was sport portrayed as meaningful cultural event. It connected, and conveyed that connection to the viewer. The paintings especially were mesmerising with their fastidious detail; a compulsion to put in every player, as many individual spectators as possible, even the tourist sights of each city. Dare one say, there was conviction here, and also an irrepressible, infectiously joyous love of the game – the artists managed to sway even an intense AFL hater like me.

While the Kunoths’ previous work has focused on the national league, the paintings and sculptures in Bush Football foreground the local football of the Central Desert, and the sense of community inspired by it. In these football paintings, the central motif of the oval as a capacious elliptical space organises two different types of action: the regulated play on the field, and the carnival atmosphere off it. The representation of football becomes not just about the players’ participation, but about the overall participatory spirit enjoyed by sportspeople and spectators alike. Like the representation of soakwater sites in more ‘traditional’ paintings, the concentric rings here – the centre square, the boundary line, the throng of watching people – act as a metonym for the gathering of a community.

Dinni and Josie are singular and idiosyncratic chroniclers of Australian life. As well as their work on football, their paintings and sculptures have represented cityscapes, outstation life at Utopia, everyday domestic objects, traditional Indigenous culture, Christian iconography and a vast array of birds and animals. Along their peripatetic path they have traversed the distance between the police van and the rodeo, the Northern Territory Intervention and the bush camel races. Theirs is an approach to art making in which the everything they come across can become a source of inspiration. They are true chroniclers, and it is an indication of the importance of football to their lives – both the bush leagues and the AFL– that it has been such a consistent and varied spur to their work. The playful quality of these works is true the spirit of bush football; Dinni and Josie make the work of art-making a form of play, and wend their family’s passionate involvement in the local sporting culture of the central desert into their work.

For further information please contact Mossenson Galleries Collingwood on (03) 9417 6694 or collingwood@mossensongalleries.com.au.