Vernon Ah Kee, Kaurna Language Ephemeral Public Art Project, 2018

Vernon Ah Kee’s Kaurna Language Ephemeral Public Art Project asserts the significance of Indigenous languages in defining culture and identity of place. The project embeds bold Kaurna words across the Fenn Place thoroughfare within the City West campus of University of South Australia. Addressing the ever-growing ‘concrete jungle’ encroachment onto Aboriginal country, the project highlights the enduring presence of Kaurna culture and connection to country.

Vernon Ah Kee of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidindji, Gugu Yimithirr and Koko Berrin peoples, is a Brisbane-based artist, activist and social critic known for text-based works that address the gap between the arts and the body politic.

An intensive consultation workshop with Kaurna Elder Dr. Lewis O’Brien and Kaurna Warra Karrpanthi language group members identified a series of words that reflect the cultural relevance of the project site:

TAPA MUIYU MARNININTHI
Tapa / Pathway
Muiyu / Seat of emotions
Marni / Good
Marnininthi / becoming better, improving

YARA / Reciprocity

Samstag and Vernon Ah Kee gratefully acknowledge the support of Professor Irene Watson, Pro Vice Chancellor Aboriginal Leadership and Strategy, UniSA.

Location: Fenn Place, UniSA, City West Campus.

APY Collective, Seven Sisters, 2018

Seven Sisters depicts a part of country where the Seven Sisters Tjukurpa and the Pitardi Tjukurpa meet, west of Amata Community.

The creation of the work was led by senior artists Wawiriya Burton, Mona Mitakiki, Sylvia Ken, and Tjungkara Ken and emerging artist Sharon Adamson, joined by Sandra Ken, Nyurpaya Kaika Burton, Wanatura Lewis, Sally Scales, Tjimpayie Prestley, Kathy Maringka, Gladys Roberts, Rita Rolley, Celine Tunkin, Madeline Curley (Kaltjiti Arts), Emily Paddy, Nyanyu Watson, Jennifer Mungee, Joyleen Roberts (Ninuku Arts). 

Purchased through the Aboriginal Leadership and Strategy Reconciliation Action Plan.

Location: Bradley Forum foyer, Level 5, Hawke Building, UniSA, City West Campus. 

Fiona Hall, Different Forms of Intelligence, 2007

Encouraging reflection on thought and creativity, Different Forms of Intelligence by Fiona Hall performs a powerful symbolic welcome to the landmark educational Hawke Building and the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art.

One of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, Hall was commissioned to create the work for the building, which opened in 2007. She responded by creating a group of six sculptural forms that combine the organ of thought with the origins of Western thinking. A tetrahedron, octahedron, cube, icosahedron and a dodecahedron—the five shapes identified by the philosophy, geometry and mathematics of antiquity as the platonic solids—have been cast in bronze or carved from wood or marble with the distinctive coil-and-rivulet structure of a brain. Hovering delicately nearby is the sixth sculpture, a human brain, cast in glass in the butterflied format of a teaching model. For Hall, ‘the fostering of multifarious ways of thinking and tackling problems and theories is of the utmost importance in our schools and universities.’

Fiona Hall lectured at the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia for many years, and continues to live and work in South Australia.

Location: Hawke Building entrance, UniSA, City West Campus.

Timothy Horn, Discomedusae, 2004

Monstrous and beautiful, a vast translucent orange jellyfish gently floats above visitors to the Hawke Building foyer. This is Timothy Horn’s Discomedusae, 2004, which has been described as a ‘masterpiece of baroque and animist wonder … a leviathan, alien creature from the dark, silent space of an ocean never previously explored, its brethren strange, primeval things’, by Ross Wolfe, the former director of the Samstag Program. Inspired by German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s renowned engravings of jellyfish, Horn has skilfully merged the natural and constructed worlds through an investigation of the physical and metaphorical qualities of his materials.

Born in Melbourne, Timothy Horn was awarded a Samstag Scholarship in 2002. He is currently based in Burlington, Vermont, USA. 

Location: Hawke Building foyer, UniSA, City West Campus.  

Nike Savvas, 2020, 2016

Nike Savvas is a Sydney based artist whose work sits as comfortably in a gallery space as it does in the public domain. Her meticulous and mesmerising installations and discrete objects, held in collections such institutions as the Victoria & Albert Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and commissioned for by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Southbank Centre, London, flash with references to high and pop culture. Minimalism, op art, Vegas and disco; her works are kaleidoscopes of light and colour that manage to pinpoint the quiet painterly moment to be found amongst their shimmering glamour.

In 2020 Nike Savvas continues her experiments with reflective materials, which she first began to explore in 1996 during her year of research at Goldsmith’s College at the University of London. Moments are fragmented and reflected by each of the thousands of perspex mirrors, strung to create a tremendous tinsel curtain that sparkles as a result of light and location. This seductive experience flashes with references to high and pop cultures, recalling the kinetic art movement of the 1960s and 70s, as well as the glamour of Vegas and disco. Reflecting the time and context of its installation, the title changes with the year, acknowledging the changing conditions this work performs in.

2020 was first exhibited under the title 2016 in the exhibition Quicksilver: 25 Years of Samstag Scholarships. A version of this work was shown in the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australia Art: Divided Worlds. 

Location: Hawke Building front window, UniSA, City West Campus. 

Aleks Danko, Songs of Australia Volume 3 - At Home, 1999 

A red brick house surrounded by larger institutional buildings, Songs of Australia Volume 3 - At Home, 1999, was conceived by Aleks Danko specifically for the city entrance to the University of South Australia. For the artist, ‘This image of the house/home transplanted from its State of Suburbia acts as a conduit between two sites of learning—the private and public experiences of our development as individuals within society.’ At times the subject of controversy, Songs of Australia Volume 3 -At Home is an early and pivotal part of the artist’s important ongoing ‘Songs of Australia’ series that both references earlier volumes and has had its red brick facade featured in subsequent work. 

Aleks Danko was born in Adelaide and attended the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia, and currently lives and works in Daylesford, Victoria.

Location: Adjacent to the Yungondi Building, UniSA, City West Campus, in the Lion Arts Centre courtyard. 

Yvonne Koolmatrie, Eel traps, 2009

These woven-sedge eel traps—narrow at one end, curving and broadening to an inviting opening at the other––are typical of the work that has brought Yvonne Koolmatrie national and international recognition.  Yvonne Koolmatrie is of the Ngarrindjeri people of the Coorong and River Murray region of South Australia and has worked to revive and maintain her people’s fibre-weaving traditions. She creates fine sculptural works that range from traditional forms, such as traps and baskets, to the far from traditional, including a hot-air balloon and a biplane. Koolmatrie says, ‘When I am weaving I feel no pain. For me the weaving is meditation.’

In 1997, Koolmatrie became one of the select few artists to have represented Australia at the Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious international art event, in an exhibition showcasing her work alongside that of Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Judy Watson. 

Location: Jeffrey Smart Building entrance foyer, UniSA, City West Campus. 

Sydney Ball, Chromix Lumina #10, Infinex series, 2015

Sydney Ball is widely regarded as one of Australia’s leading abstract colour painters. His artistic practice forms a critical link between Australian painting and American abstraction, one of the great art movements of the twentieth century.

 As a young man in the 1960s, Ball studied in New York at the Art Students League under Theodoros Stamos and alongside artists Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. After returning to Australia in 1965, Ball produced his Modular series, abandoning conventional painting formats to create works comprising geometric forms articulated in fields of contrasting colour. Chromix Lumina #10 returns to this style of painting and forms part of Ball’s Infinex series that he began in 2010 and continued until his death at age 83.

Throughout his long career, Ball continued to push the limits of his practice to greater heights and maintained significant relevance as a contemporary Australian artist. His oeuvre is expansive and diverse, with each series marked by a monumental and dynamic change, yet all continuing his investigation into the possibilities of colour and form.

Location: Pridham Hall, UniSA, City West Campus.

The Sydney Ball Gift

The University of South Australia is honoured to be the beneficiary of a most generous gift by celebrated Adelaide-born artist Sydney Ball, who has donated a large body of his key works of art.

Sydney Ball’s artistic practice is a critical link between Australian painting and one of the great art movements of the twentieth century – American abstraction. Display of The Sydney Ball Gift creates the most extensive and exemplary permanent exhibition
of Sydney Ball’s work, providing an unparalleled opportunity to view the trajectory, concerns and achievements of his extraordinary fifty-year career. The University is especially pleased to receive and display the gift due to the artist’s longstanding connections to Adelaide and the University. Sydney Ball was born in Adelaide in 1933, and is an alumni and former lecturer of what was the School of Art, Architecture and Design, now UniSA Creative, at the University of South Australia.

Wander the Sir Eric Neal Library at UniSA's Mawson Lakes Campus to find thirty-one artworks by Ball.

READ: The Sydney Ball Gift

Location: Library, UniSA, Mawson Lakes Campus.

Ngupulya PUMANI, Antara, 2017

Born west of Mimili, South Australia, Ngupulya Pumani is a senior Anangu woman committed to fostering traditional law and culture and preserving the Yankunytjatjara language. Pumani began painting in 2009 and has been inspired by her mother to portray her country with broad brush strokes and intense luminous palettes.

Strongly anchored to the land and the power it holds, Pumani weaves stories from her country across her canvas. Pumani paints her family's Dreaming; her mother's ngura (homeland) is Antara and her father's is near Watarru. Antara is a sacred place associated with the Maku Tjukurpa (Witchetty Grub Dreaming) and Antara, 2017, employs pale, earthy colours to depict the desert landscape, contrasted with patterns of intense, bright dots and lines to represent symbols, figures and their journeys. Her paintings portray a truth, a unique rawness, but also a joy of culture and tradition.

Purchased through the Aboriginal Leadership and Strategy Reconciliation Action Plan. Image courtesy the artist and Mimili Maku Arts.

Location: Wirringka Student Services, City East Campus. 

Darren Siwes, Gold Puella and Gold Homo Hominus, from the series Oz Omnium Rex Et Regina, 2009

These photographs by South Australian artist Darren Siwes puts forward First Nations heads of state for so-called Australia. Siwes's series Oz Omnium Rex Et Regina draws on the symbol of the coin to signify financial and cultural exchange and the enduring power of representation. The artist wittily demonstrates the way class delineations and our hierarchical systems can mean the difference between a mug shot or a head of state.

Darren Siwes is a Ngalkban man living and working on Kaurna Yerta. His photographic art practice resides somewhere between truth and the hypothetical, addressing issues of class, culture, place and identity. Siwes is an alumnus of the University of South Australia, completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honors) in 1996. In 2002, he received a Samstag Scholarship and studied at the Chelsea School of Art, London, where he completed a Master of Fine Art. Siwes’s work is held in major collections both nationally and abroad, including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Reina Sofia Madrid, Spain.

Location: Wirringka Student Services, Mawson Lakes Campus.