By Paul Dunwell, writing for EasyFrame
© Copyright EasyFrame 2021
Bessie Nakamara Sims (an indigenous / aboriginal Australian painter, draughtswoman and printmaker born circa 1932) is credited with the creation of the painting ‘Possum Dreaming’ (or ‘Janganpa Jukurrupa’) which is currently in the keep of Brighton and Hove Museums on the UK’s South coast.
This piece should not be confused with another work, ‘Kangaroo, Cabbage, Ceremonial Speer (sic), Possum and Bush Carrot Dreaming’ which she co-created with her husband Paddy Japaljarri Sims (born circa 1916) and which is in the keep of the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, Glasgow on the West coast of Scotland.
Bessie Nakamara Sims was born in the bush to an aboriginal culture that never developed its own written language but recorded what was important pictorially, and for many years she never met any white Caucasians. Even then she only took up painting when she was over 50, in the mid-1980s, after she’d had seven children (and seen the births of many grandchildren). But her husband Paddy Japaljarri Sims had already, for many years, been an internationally-respected artist. It seems that for much of her life she was in her husband’s shadow but eventually stepped out of it.
That may have been a late start yet she made such an impact in her own right that her work has been exhibited in not only her native Australia (you can see it on show at Canberra’s National Gallery as well as in Sydney’s Australian Museum, but it is also in the keep of galleries and museums in the Northern Territory) but furthermore in Britain, Germany and the United States of America.
Her work features symbols representing culturally vital ingredients of the aborigine’s much-vaunted survivalist skills. So ‘Kangaroo, Cabbage, Ceremonial Speer (sic), Possum and Bush Carrot Dreaming’, for example, refers to two marsupials – kangaroos which taste like beef and possums which are juicy and taste better than the non-native rabbit – together with two plants that foragers usually locate and dig up in creek-beds. There are, of course, scores of different marsupials in Australia (and Tasmania, where there are also aborigines). These constitute what we all now recognise as ‘bush tucker’, or food which resourceful survivalists would locate and eat. (One is tempted to say it is easy to endure a bush-tucker trial and manage on it for a week or so, especially for TV cameras, but these people did it for tens of thousands of years!)
The reference to a ceremonial spear in the artist’s aforementioned work with her husband speaks for itself if one realises that Australian aborigines traditionally believe that ancestors created everything including the terrain, providing them with tribal lands, that their spirits continue to provide hunting tools, and that the long-dead and currently-alive continue to communicate through symbols or totems and dreaming. Dreamtime, as it is called, represents this interface between living and long-dead aborigines. Modern palaeontologists believe that humans first reached the continent of Australia and became immediately isolated around 58,000 years ago, something borne out by analysis of genetic lineages through DNA. This isolation through the aeons credits the Australian aborigines with having the oldest culture in the world in some regards, and instantly renders it worthy of respect. So there is every reason to believe that the artist, though her work, provided for a global audience an insight into a belief-system that is comfortably older than our own (the oldest parts of the Bible’s Old Testament appear to have origins that are around a mere 25,000 years old by comparison). And, of course, by tradition any aboriginal art that has endured would only be found etched in - or on - stone. Yet, by using acrylics that have only been commercially available since the 1950s, and by working on canvas, Bessie Nakamara Sims has found a portable way to perpetuate her people’s belief system - still alive in stories and songs, art and ceremonies though the culture is threatened with obsolescence - and establish a wider-world’s awareness of it.
‘Possum Dreaming’, which measures 1.52 metres tall by 61 cm broad, is an example of what is known as ‘aboriginal dot painting’ and was executed in acrylics on canvas. It might be politically incorrect to label it as ‘primitive art’, or ‘child-like’ or ‘naïve’ or ‘simplistic’ though to Western / first-world / civilised eyes that’s what it is. But it is fair to say that it is neither realistic nor anatomically correct. Instead it is ornamental and, though it appears to be unsophisticated, it may well incorporate a wealth of coded knowledge - which uneducated outsiders cannot decode - in the same way that Inca, Chinese and Native North American knot records do. Like many pieces of this genre it works with limited colour and concentric patterns that almost mimic the geophysical images one sees of ancient fortifications.
It is important to understand that the work is called ‘Possum Dreaming’ not because the possum is asleep, but because the artist is depicting her surreal visualisation of the animal as prey, food (they can weigh up to 20 pounds) and salvation. This might be compared with the modern management insistence that anyone who wants to be successful in their career must imagine where they are going.
I mentioned a surreal element. ‘Surrealism’ of course strives to depict what one sees on the threshold of sleep and wakefulness. And the concept, the genre, is famous as a European movement. Yet Bessie Nakamara Sims and fellow aboriginal artists have apparently discovered this in parallel (and perhaps well before we did in Europe) for themselves. We might go further than that comparison. She could also be defined as an ‘expressionist’ because she was employing a style of painting that expresses her inner emotional world rather than the realistic world around her. And, because she was not accurately depicting the subject, in a sense she was an ‘impressionist’ too (without the slap-it-on-to-depict-light brushwork best exemplified by the French impressionists). In that sense one might compare this form of aboriginal art with the French impressionist offshoot known as ‘pointillism’, a technique used by artists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac who broke up what they saw into little dots (almost like the pixels you have from your camera-phone, though their palette was much more restricted by their paints).
It will improve your understanding of the subject-matter to know that possums are often tree-dwellers (or do so in part anyway) and have strong prehensile (grasping) tails from which they often spend long periods hanging upside down. But, despite what many believe, they don’t often go to sleep like that though they are nocturnal so likely to be sleepy during the day. Nevertheless Bessie Nakamara Sims seems to have depicted her possum upside down (it looks like there is a curly tail towards the top).
It might also be worth knowing that she probably was painting her dream of a phalangeridae possum, which is the most common in Australia (possums can be found in other countries too) and this group includes cuscuses (these are a bigger variant of possum and can weigh up to 22 pounds). But it might instead be a phalangeriformes possum (a tree-dweller), or a common brushtail possum, or a common ringtail possum. What it isn’t is an opossum, which (contrary to what you might read) is not the same thing. Opossums are a similar animal native to North America.
It is likely that the artist had to ask permission to depict ‘Possum Dreaming’ or any other subject, since essentially the work should be a dream or story relevant to her own people. And it might contain coded meaning, even within layers, that her people might consider as essentially holy and not to be shared with outsiders. So you’d not get a dot-for-dot explanation of it anyway, were you to be able to ask her for it.
Yet the artist, who came from a remote community 175 miles North West of Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territories and where she was (like her husband) a respected elder, herself spoke of the importance of ‘dreamtime’ in the execution of her work, saying: “I like painting cause it’s my Dreaming – Bush Carrot, Yam Dreaming… From my father and grandfather’s side. I like to teach kids my Dreaming. I want everyone to know my Dreaming from all over the world. I know and they can know…”
Apropos that dreaming one should know that ‘pituri’, a mixture of leaves (tobacco, acacia, eucalyptus etc) and wood-ash, is traditionally chewed by Australian aborigines as a stimulant (though extended use makes it act as a depressant). Seemingly some of these mixes can have a mild psychoactive effect, though historically they’d be chewed to keep hungry hunters going in the same way that coca-leaves are used in South America. Yet this effect may well explain a component of the dreaming captured in aboriginal art.
In summary here was an artist who celebrated her land, its features and its plants and animals, in a unique way that’s contemporary yet captures a culture that sidestepped every art movement we know.
If you want an original then don’t assume that Australian aboriginal art is cheap. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s ‘Warlugong’ was sold to the National Gallery of Australia for AUS$ 2.4 million (over £1.3 million) in 2007. And Emily Kngwarreye’s ‘Earth’s Creation’ (the record for any Australian artist) fetched AUS$ 2.1 million (nearly £1.2 million) in 2017.
You can easily and affordably buy unframed prints of Bessie Nakamarra Sims’s work. The print above, for example, can be bought through the British Museum at www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_2008-7019-4-3.
But you could also more directly support the Australian aborigines’ indigenous culture and economy by going to buy their work from the likes of the Warlukurlangu Artists’ site at https://warlu.com/.
You'll want to frame whatever you buy. Any good framers will be able to show you a vast range of different solutions and advise on what might be the most suitable given the work and its proposed location.
EasyFrame is on 01234 856 501 and / or sales@EasyFrame.co.uk and they'll always chat even if you don't want to buy!
Article Posted: 17/05/2021 09:19:50