At National Gallery of Victoria, NGV Australia, artist Clinton Naina looks up at his latest work: Stolen Climate, composed under Melbourne’s 2020 lockdown. The four panel artwork glows like the embers of a bushfire that swept through the gallery. The painting shows a deeply emotional response to bushfire, coral bleaching and climate change, and the colonial thread.
It’s the first time Clinton Naina is seen it on a gallery wall. Under spotlights on a dark wall it appears almost three dimensional, burned into the fabric and the wall behind by the White King bleach used in its creation. It won the prestigious Premier’s Award at the 2020 Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, but he wasn’t able to be there.
Naina’s work sits at the centre of Big Weather, a new exhibition at NGV Australia including new works and others drawn from the institution’s collection. The rooms cover themes such as fire, wind and floods, from artists including Seth Namatjira, Dot Peters and Emily Kame Kngwarreye, exploring the deep and sophisticated understanding of weather and climate embedded in First Nations culture and art.
It was put together by Hannah Presley, curator of Indigenous art at NGV. In her early research, trying to get her head around the NGV’s enormous collection, “a lot of the works that I was drawn to seemed to be around weather and country, and this idea of thunder gods and lightning spirits,” she says.
“It’s this old kind of information, and way of understanding the country and the weather and how everything worked,” she says. “This balance, this really sophisticated understanding has existed for a very long time – we’re talking about First Peoples that were connected to this country through the Ice Age. The artists are keepers of that cultural knowledge, they point to all of these understandings that have existed and were transported through generations, through artworks… I thought yeah, this is something worth talking about. We’re facing this pretty dire messaging about climate change at the moment. And it really does feel like Indigenous cultural knowledge, and cultural leadership, is going to be a big chunk of how we deal with it, if we face it the way we need to.”
Naina’s work was bold and direct on the subject, Presley says. “He’s talking about loss and grief. It’s a key work in the show, he’s looking at the bigger picture around climate change and the impact on First Nations people.”
Naina acknowledges the loss and grief but he also allows for hope. “A lot has been ignored and destroyed,” he says. “But [the climate change crisis] is a great opportunity to learn, to open your eyes, and your ears, and everything, to something new.