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Thanakupi (Thancoupie) is a Thaynakwith community elder, educator and ceramicist whose homelands are in Andoom country. She was born in Napranum, near Weipa on the Western Cape York Peninsula, in 1937. The Weipa Mission was established at Napranum by the Presbyterian church in 1898, and Thanakupi was baptised 'Gloria Fletcher’ by the missionaries – only when she moved to Sydney and became a practising artist did she adopt her traditional name, which means 'flower of the wattle’. Her early childhood was spent camping and travelling in the bush with her community but from the age of five she lived at the missionary school dormitory at Napranum. Thanakupi experienced the tragic loss of her twin sister at an early age, and in 1942 her father was killed while stationed on Thursday Island as an Australian serviceman in WW2. In 1957 the mining company Comalco leased land around the mission from the Queensland government to mine bauxite, which had been discovered there in 1955. Over the next few years the mining enterprise expanded, encroaching upon the homes of Thanakupi’s family and community, and bringing more non-Indigenous people, consumables and culture into Western Cape York.

In 1971, despite the fact that she was officially still under the jurisdiction of the Queensland Aboriginal Protection Act, Thanakupi moved to Sydney to study art. She had had some experience painting, holding an exhibition with Dick Roughsey, the Mornington Island bark painter who would become the first chairman of the Aboriginal Arts Board, in Cairns in 1968. Due to her lack of secondary school qualifications, she was unsuccessful in her efforts to begin tertiary arts education until Peter Rushforth accepted her into the Ceramics Department at the East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School) in Darlinghurst. She thus became the first Indigenous Australian to study fine arts at a tertiary level. Among her teachers there was the Japanese potter Shiga Shigeo, who recognised her skill with brushwork and encouraged her to pursue a minimalist style of image-making. During the third year of her degree Thanakupi shared a house and studio (known as Volta) with Jennifer Isaacs, then head of the Aboriginal arts unit at the Australian Council for the Arts (with whom she has maintained a close friendship), photographer Jon Rhodes and dancer Carole Johnson, in Surry Hills. Thanakupi held her first ceramics exhibition at Volta, and her association with the group enabled her to develop a sense of disciplined artistic practice and to establish relationships with other practising artists, professional art networks and crafts associations. At the same time she came into contact with members of the Redfern Aboriginal community, including activists such as Chicka Dixon, Charlie Perkins and Euphemia and Lester Bostock, and participated in the Tent Embassy protests in Canberra.

In 1976 Thanakupi moved to a studio under the government gallery in Cairns, and after a few years the Aboriginal Development Commission helped her establish a pottery at Trinity Beach. During the period between 1976 and 1983 Thanakupi travelled to Mexico, Canada and the US as an Australian representative to the World Craft Council. There she observed the significance of pottery to Indigenous groups’ cultural regeneration programs, which would prove to be influential upon her own innovative use of the medium to serve comparable needs at Weipa. By the 1980s Thanakupi had held numerous exhibitions around Australia, and in 1986 she was appointed Australian Cultural Commissioner to the Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil.

Thanakupi’s most recognisable works are spherical pots and ceramic eggs, with boldly etched linear designs and small fingered openings. Iron oxide is often painted into the incised surface to enhance the designs. She has also produced large-scale tile murals and sculpted works that render a variety of natural forms. In the last few years the artist has employed a brushed bauxite finish: 'bauxite tells the story of my place, about the land, its qualities, about how they found it good for aluminium and then the mine, and all the changes that happened from that’ (in Simon Wright, Thanakupi: Firsthand, 2006). Recent platter shaped works 'evoke the cracked earth crust after mining and have surfaces covered in sketched stories’ (information sourced from Jennifer Isaacs). In 2002 Thanakupi worked with cast bronze when she contributed to a significant public art site at Reconciliation Place, Canberra. Brisbane based 'Urban Art’ commissioned Thanakupi to create the patterning on the surface of the commemorative bronze sliver featuring her friend Dr Evelyn Scott, one of three women (the others being Jessie Street and Faith Bandler) being celebrated at the 'Women Artwork’ site for their significant contribution to the Australian reconciliation movement. Thanakupi also produced the sculptural work 'Kwi’ith, Man and Woman Yam’ for Reconciliation Place, which consists of large-scale bronze yam sculptures with intricately textured surfaces.

With pottery Thanakupi was able to develop a personal artistic language utilising a material that connected her with home, family, and Thaynakwith tradition. She was immediately attracted to working with clay because of the sacred purpose of the medium in traditional ceremonial life on Weipa: usually controlled by men, it was used to decorate sacred objects and create body paintings during ceremony. With colour, Thanakupi usually limits her choice to those that have a tribal use: 'Red was sacred, white was purity, black was death, ochre happy, gay’ (quoted in Liz Thompson, “Aboriginal Voices”, 1990, p.167). The knowledge Thanakupi gained in her early childhood, when her family would read seasonal changes in plant and animal life in order to locate food, has remained foundational to her art: 'My early years were spent learning all about food gathering, about the rain and the sun and how much we were dependent on all the elements, water, fire, earth’ (Thompson, 1990, p. 164). This interdependence, and the cyclical continuity of life, underpins the centrality of the circle – in two and three dimensions – in the artist’s work. Besides the spherical or egg-like shape of her works, circles often dominate the markings that decorate the surface of her pots, broadly symbolising the earth, the unity of a people around a fire, and fertility: 'The circle, to me, is the tribes of the Napranum all together, the lands all connected. It is also love, fire and warmth, and the earth. And it is also woman and mother’ (quoted in Jennifer Isaacs, “Thancoupie the Potter”, 1982, p. 66).

Other designs that adorn Thanakupi’s pots include totemic animals such as kangaroos, possums, emus, flying foxes, barramundi, stingrays, turtles, land and water based plants such as yam, seed pods and seaweed, and anthropomorphic beings. These designs often depict the creation stories and cautionary parables of the Napranum tribes, and thus can be read as maps of land ownership (information sourced from Thanakupi). While early in her career Thanakupi would say that her people had lost their traditional knowledge, her burgeoning understanding of the art form’s potential to conserve and pass on cultural lore led her to seek out knowledge from members of the community. On trips to Weipa she would take the old people into the bush to camp and visit significant sites, to assist them to recall and clarify ancestral stories (Isaacs, 1982, p. 43). This allowed Thanakupi to expand the repertoire of narratives she was able to interpret and memorialise on her pots. The maturation of Thanakupi’s artistic practice has thus paralleled her progress towards becoming a bearer of Thaynakwith culture for younger people: she has been able to reanimate the knowledge of previous elders that had been displaced by Christianity and other forces of Western culture.

Thanakupi has loved the company of children and been committed to their care and education throughout her adult life. At the age of 24, she and a number of other Weipa women attained a preschool teaching certificate in Brisbane, and Thanakupi went on to establish the first pre-school at the church on Weipa, which ran for a number of years. Thanakupi’s craft has proved to be ideally suited to her role as educator and custodian within her community: the hieroglyphic form of her designs convey meaning concisely, echo the body paintings that are a tradition of her people, and recall the symbols traditionally drawn in the sand for educational/story telling purposes. Thanakupi’s grandmother’s sand drawings, making use of ash and other coloured dusts, are among her earliest memories. 'My next door granny-in-law would pick out some coloured ash and draw a turtle… then she would colour the turtle by sprinkling sand and ash – yellow, white, black and parts red. I’m sure every time I draw a turtle, it is exactly like her turtle’ (in Isaacs, 1982, p. 29). Thanakupi has taught pottery and craft at a number of schools in North Queensland and since 1988 has run Holiday Programs for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous children at the Bouchat outstation in her homelands in Weipa, to pass on knowledge about the bush, provide arts education, improve community cohesion, and to further reconciliation. Her sense of responsibility to her community has led her to move back home where she is now the only fluent speaker of the Thaynakwith language and the primary keeper of local knowledge, 'always balancing her multiple roles as teacher, advocate and mentor, active in both the community and business sectors’ (Wright, 2006). She has long been involved in negotiations over land use agreements and has recently spearheaded projects to protect the Thaynakwith language, including school-based literacy programs, and the 2007 publication 'Thanakupi’s Guide to Language and Culture: A Thaynakwith Dictionary’.

Thanakupi has held a number of solo exhibitions throughout her career, including a retrospective held at the Museum of Brisbane and the Cairns Regional Gallery in 2001 and most recently 'Thanakupi: A Gatherer’s View’ at the Craft Queensland Gallery in Brisbane, 2006. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in Australia and overseas, and examples of her work can be found in most state art institutions. Public recognition of Thanakupi’s contribution to art, education and reconciliation has resulted in numerous awards, including the Order of Australia in 2004, the Visual Artist Emeritus Award from the Australian Council for the Arts in 2007, and honorary doctorates from Griffith University and James Cook University.

References

 

Tradition Today: Indigenous Art in Australia, 2004, Brook, Natasha, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, pp.134-5

 

'Thanakupi’s Guide to Language and Culture: A Thaynakwith Dictionary’, Fletcher, Thancoupie Gloria, Jennifer Isaacs Arts & Publishing Pty Ltd, Sydney, NSW

 

Thancoupie the Potter, Isaacs, Jennifer, Aboriginal Artists Agency, Sydney, NSW pp.29, 43, 66

 

Story place: Indigenous Art of Cape York and the Rainforest, Johnson, Trish, Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, Qld, p. 72

 

Thancoupie: ABC Message Sticks Story, Tamou, Rima (Producer), http://www.abc.net.au/message/tv/ms/s1175226.htm, Australian Broadcasting Corporation

 

Aboriginal Voices, Thompson, Liz, pp.164, 167

 

Thanakupi: Firsthand, Wright, Simon, Art Monthly, Issue 196, Summer

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