Design and Art Australia Online

Bluey Roberts, painter, carver and muralist, was born in Meningie in the Coorong, South Australia, in 1948. Roberts is a Ngarrindjeri/Kokatha artist, with connections to the upper and lower Murray River on his mother’s side, and to the region around Ceduna and Minippa on the South Australian coast on his father’s side. He spent the early part of his life in the Riverland region of South Australia before moving to Adelaide. He began his art practice when an arm injury prevented him from working as a fruit picker as he had for most of his early adult life. Besides painting, he learnt to carve boomerangs and decorate them with acrylic painting and the 'burning in’ technique, and to carve emu eggs. Roberts’ work is informed by the stories and spiritual knowledge that are associated with the land and have been passed down to him by his parents and grandparents. He is inspired by Ngarrindjeri Dreamings and material culture and his memories of growing up beside the Murray River. As a painter, he predominantly depicts landscapes of the country in which he grew up and with which he is affiliated by ancestry, creating scenes busy with the activity of emus, kangaroos and birds. Native animal life are also often represented in their spirit form as Dreaming ancestors.
Roberts’ artistic career gained momentum in the late 1980s as a result of several public art commissions. In 1985 he was commissioned by the Aboriginal Development Commission to paint a mural of a dancing Dreaming Kangaroo at the Adelaide Zoo. In 1989 he took up an artist’s residency at the Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, which had been established in that year. This residency allowed Roberts to produce an expansive ground mural titled River Spirit Dreaming within the footpath outside Tandanya. Roberts’ designs were converted to a form that could withstand pavement life by having sections of coloured concrete embedded within moulded cement blocks. A small paving block, pondi (Murray Cod), which was part of the larger mural, was acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia. Roberts’ first solo exhibition, 'River Spirit Dreaming’, was staged at the Kuarna Gallery at Tandanya in 1990, and apart from celebrating the creation of the mural, it displayed paintings, carved emu eggs and boomerangs, including two that had been carved by Roberts and painted by Pro Hart. In 1990 Roberts also participated in the 'Tandanya 'Look at us now’' exhibition at Tandanya. In 2003 his work was exhibited in 'Tactility: two centuries of Indigenous objects, textiles and fibre’ at the National Gallery of Australia. In 2008/2009 a photographic portrait of Roberts, created by Angela Lynkushka, was included in the State Library of Victoria’s 'The Changing Face of Victoria’ exhibition. Roberts’ sister is the renowned Ngarrindjeri weaver Yvonne Koolmatrie. Roberts is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, the South Australian Museum, Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute and the Flinders University Art Museum.

Writers:

Fisher, Laura

Date written:

2011

Last updated:

2011