Silhouette of Memories is the exhibition outcome of Tweed Regional Gallery's inaugural Bundjalung award, presented to First Nations artist Michael Philp as part of the 2022 Wollumbin Art Award. Philp received the award for this painting Pearly Shells, 2022, which honoured his mother, aunty, and grandmother, and was the inspiration for this new body of work.

Philp's painting in Silhouette of Memories kindly invite us into personal moments of a sentimental recollection. Each painting was created from a treasured memory or an old photograph and highlights Philp's strong connection to family and friends. Over the past twelve months while Philp researched and painted, he experienced an emotional journey full of mixed emotions.

"Several of the people I decided to use as part of the collection have passed away and there are other people who I don't have contact with anymore. There are people who don't talk to each other, and many families with rifts and feuds, long-standing resentments and mistrust. What I was looking for in this body of work was interconnectedness through family ties. Some are stronger than others, and some storylines go back years and years, and demonstrate the ebb and flow of relationships that sometimes change and end, then restart again after many years."

For Philp, trying to capture a small snapshot of a large family and community with many connections was a difficult task at times, but one he hopes will show how much he honours his relationships and one which expresses his sincere feelings towards those he holds close.

"I grew up with a large extended family so the social and cultural connections run deep over many generations. I feel strongly about each painting and the emotional connections I have with everyone who is being depicted. With my exhibition, I get to honour these people in some small way."

Philp's minimalist approach allows him to manoeuvre the multiple stories and personal histories which are interwoven and created over many years. His approach focuses on expressing the essence, energy and spirit of each individual to allow them to stand tall and strong.

"What I've learnt and gained from doing this body of work is that  spirit, love and forgiveness, and what I find important now, was also important when I was growing up. I just didn't understand it back then."

Philp's collection of memories, expressed in striking silhouettes that ebb and flow, echo the strength and sinuous nature of close and enduring connections.

Started in 2012 My Saltwater Murris is an ongoing body of paintings that focuses on identity within a fractured community and changed landscape, as a process of healing. This series of night-time work is a collection of dark and profound moments that anticipate the day ahead.

I don’t come from a traditional background, particularly a traditional background of storytelling. I wouldn’t have a clue about those traditional communities. It wasn’t something I was ever really interested in. I grew up in an urban environment. All I was worried about was trying to score. It was a very narrow world I lived in for so long. When I got stoned I just wanted to be out of it. I didn’t want to think, I didn’t want to feel, I didn’t want to communicate. I really loved that experience.

Feelings of isolation and death are not without redemptive shards of colour and light. Emphasizing the unseen, night is the bridge between the physical and spiritual world. Broad expanses of dark are punctuated by potent symbolism. Each canvas is a matrix of personal story. People are black or white. Relationships are described through form, scale and position. Each completed work is an expression of some inner resolution. Resolution between family members, between Michael’s Minjungbal country and his home today in Lismore, between things that happened in the past and things that are happening today. Personal healing and acceptance is rendered in paint.

It's really been a way of navigating back to my family. That Saltwater work opened me up to an understanding of my father. His role in my family, and his role in the community. The white community and the indigenous community. He had a big role to play in his life as a community man. Personally, and professionally as a fisherman.

These paintings are a world away from Michael’s early drawings. His practice has developed but he still has the same issues and art continues to play a therapeutic role, making sense of life and its contradictions.

I just keep trying to find that inner place of acceptance. Coming to terms with things and trying to make peace with myself. Making sense of things in my own way. Sometimes though it’s like opening a Pandora’s box. Opening up other things. To be honest I don’t know if that’s that crash hot of an idea. It’s just how my art seems to operate most of the time. Sometimes I’d like to be able to paint nice little flowers.

As the sun sets the bright coast retreats to reveal the moon, the stars and wider universe. Detail is neglected. The land, people and stars are formed of the same matter. Figures commune with the coast, sky and ocean, as units within a larger interconnected ecosystem, both physical and emotional. The coast is neither a setting or backdrop, but an actual working part of identity, history and community. The work is simultaneously portrait and landscape. Both nostalgic and damaged, this singular statement of place and identity is a triumph of healing, reconciliation and optimism.

(Text by Tom Walgers)

Michael is a Bundjalung man working in Lismore painting his story. Born to a white fisherman and a Murri woman, Michael grew up in Minjungbal country roughly situated in the Tweed Heads and Gold Coast area. This exhibition at Lismore Regional Gallery brings together two bodies of work from different periods of his life. The series are called, Cosmology In Me and My Saltwater Murris, with the exhibition taking on the same name of the first series. Together the works show us the constant themes of memory and history, the change within Michael as a person, as well as the development of his own form expression in relating the interconnection of identity, country and the wider universe.

Completed fifteen years ago through a local art therapy program after twenty years of drug and alcohol addiction, Cosmology In Me is Michael’s earliest body of work as a visual artist.

It was pretty frantic when I did the work. It was very cathartic and very quick. I think at this time when this work came about, I was quite amazed at how this body of work came out. I had no preconceived idea. I was just drawing – just getting it out. It still took a little longer after the drawings for me to get into art. These drawings came about a year or two, maybe three before the art started taking off.

The science of the origin and development of the universe’s cosmology is directed inwards as the origin of oneself, of where one comes from, of who one is. Michael connects disparate fragments to create a sense of coherent reality, remembered childhood story, flashes of country, and ongoing relationships with family are processed and projected as his personal story. An inner story creates the opportunity for a dialogue and common narratives between persons or peoples. These stories are for everyone he says. For Michael art has always been a healing and reconciliative process.

I wish I had spent more time with the elders. I have been trying to piece together what I can over the years. Art has been part of that process and it’s definitely been a personal journey. It really is about me becoming whole. I want to know where I come from.

These early drawings map an interior world, as a chart of emotional dynamics between Michael, his family and friends. They can be understood as spirit images depicting an unseen world of energy and flow, each figure with its definitive place as parts within an infinite whole. Trunks dissolve into arms, which dissolve into fingers, before becoming currents within a larger network. Heads and reproductive organs are aggregations of flow. Egg, seeds, trees – everything is in constant flux between spirit and matter. There are hierarchies of form, within which there are orders of vibration, with further typologies of amplitude and frequency. This is a language of relation and connection.

The truth in doing those things is it’s simple. I don’t have to have an art degree. I don’t have to do a life drawing type of image, it’s enough for me to do a stick figure. I’ve used my own subconscious imagery. That’s enough for me to create the image that can evoke that spirit. There’s still a part of me that believes in the afterlife and spirit people. I suppose it’s different now to when I was younger. I have said it publicly before and I do believe the ancestors are with me in spirit.

The lyricism and gesture of the line and pattern reaches a note of hyperactivity and hints at anxiety, violence and fixation. The connections between figures are sometimes expressed as tension and power, with the tortured figure suspended within the larger web. After twenty years of alcohol and drug abuse, things had finally caught up with Michael.

Since I got sober it hit me. I’d stopped taking drugs and drinking alcohol. Those experiences had penetrated me but I didn’t get to feel them until I had stopped drinking and taking drugs. And I have basically been dealing with that for the last fifteen years. A big part of dealing with that has been through art.

My art mainly looks at the relationships between aboriginal people, in a contemporary way, opening the window on the life and lives of aboriginal people who live their lives in urban and semi-rural areas.

Growing up basically on the Gold Coast being exposed to modern pop culture, that mainly of American pop culture. The music, the films, the fashion, I didn’t know any different, of course. I knew I was aboriginal and was proud of it, for me personally a lot of stories that my grandmother talked about, went through one ear, out the other.

When I was a teenager, aboriginal stories of the past couldn’t hold my attention long enough. I was more hanging out with my mates and checking out girls. It’s only now that I regret not paying more attention to my grandmother.

These paintings are portraits of local friends and families. I use mainly dots in my paintings to depict the Bundjalung country that they stand upon, I found this technique useful to denote indigenous country as most people recognise this technique as aboriginal. It has also been a very meditative technique that has been extremely healing for my general anxiety.

Urban aboriginal people have been exposed to so much of the dominate culture that sometimes I wonder where they begin and where we end or vice versa. We own homes, have good educations, are employed in professional jobs and so on, contemporary aboriginal people have carved a path from the days of oppression in the sixties, with the referendum, to the land rights marches of the seventies and eighties, to a place over the last twenty years where young aboriginal people have so much more opportunities than previously. The road is still long but aboriginal affairs have come a long way, so has our art, music, dance and drama.

Aboriginal people have new exciting stories to tell the world about, to me this is a great freedom creatively and culturally. It’s been so liberating for me personally to be able to use the medium of painting to express how I feel, about issues and the way aboriginal people live their lives in a modern context. Being more open about sexuality, spirituality, motherhood, fatherhood.

Being a parent issues of drug and alcohol on aboriginal communities, sexual abuse within aboriginal communities, the role mainstream religions have had on indigenous peoples, being both positive and negative, altering our perceptions of reality. Not all those experiences are bad in a lot of cases people can find stories of courage, strength and love.

There have been groups and individuals within the mainstream society over several generations who have been champion advocates of aboriginal people and that continues today but like anything worthwhile, change has to come from within the aboriginal community and from within the individual. My strength of purpose comes from my art my creativity and my spirituality in the creator.