From his Lombadina community on the Dampier Peninsula on Western Australia’s West Kimberley Coast, Darrell Sibosado engages in a dynamic contemporary continuation of riji (carved pearl shell) traditions. Created and traded over generations, riji are customarily worn on the groin for ceremony, and are ‘a symbol of knowledge, power and maturity that connects the old and the new’.1 Sibosado translates their geometric, maze-like patterns and motifs, traditionally etched onto the inner surface of the pearl shell, into abstractionist artworks and installations. Inherited from his ancestors, the designs inspire his innovative expressions of Bard culture: ‘these are the designs and stories we live by’, ‘they’re my inspiration. It’s an ancient language and an ancient style’.2
Through his work, Sibosado expresses the interconnected worldview of Bard practices, language, Country, culture and liyan, or spirit, as he explains:
. . . (liyan is) your being and how we’re all connected to each other. That’s what these designs try to reflect. They try to reflect the relationship between the subject and everything else around them. It’s a whole other way of seeing things.3
Sibosado demonstrated this worldview in his first large-scale sculptural installation presented as part of ‘Desert River Sea: Portraits of the Kimberley’, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, in 2019, which was also exhibited at ‘Tarnanthi 2019’, at the Art Gallery of South Australia, later that year. At ‘Tarnanthi’ the installation — created in corten steel and measuring over five metres tall and three metres in length — was composed of the works Minnimb (Humpback whale), Undoord (Mating turtles) and Aalingoon (Rainbow serpent), all 2019, and brought together three stories of immense importance.
More recent works, Ngarrgidj Morr (the proper path to follow) 2022 and Galalan at Gumiri 2023 present symbolic designs in glowing white neon that explicitly evoke the iridescence of the riji’s surface. Echoing the aesthetics of traditional forms solidifies the connection of Sibosado’s works to the deep cultural knowledge and lore embodied in riji, which are believed to be ‘the glistening scales shed by Aalingoon, the Rainbow Snake, when he rests on the ocean’s surface’.4
On display in APT11, Sibosado’s Ilgarr (blood) 2024 is an evolution of past works. Its design — composed in enamelled steel and backlit with neon LED — is a dynamic expression of Bard ancestral land, lore, language and philosophy. Within the work, multiple symbols combine to assert the importance of ilgarr (blood). Symbolic of inheritance and identity, blood is a sacred life force, within pulsing vascular tributaries supplying essential nutrients throughout the body. Sibosado’s designs consider the sacredness, or theology, of blood; what it means to draw blood; the discovery of blood by ancient beings; and, as Sibosado explains, ‘the different relationships with, and significance of blood in our lore and throughout our culture’.5
The artist’s choice of material and technology is integral to his aspiration to reaffirm cultural adaptability, and highlights the contemporary relevance of his inherited Bard designs and traditions, as he explains:
This is what has been passed down to me to continue and take it where it’s going. It’s an ever-changing thing . . . It’s about taking these traditional practices and traditional languages into the contemporary space, and making people realise that it doesn’t only belong way back 1000 years ago, it belongs here, because I’m here now, and it is me.6
With their impressive scale and materiality, Darrell Sibosado’s creations embody the ancient knowledge, language, lore and aesthetics at the centre of Bard culture, while illuminating the continued relevance and fluidity in expression of cultural practice for new audiences.
Sophia Sambono
Endnotes
1 Teho Ropeyarn, quoted in North by East West: Re-igniting a Cultural Connection through Pearl Shell [exhibition catalogue], Cairns Art Gallery, Cairns, 2018, p.3.
2 Darrell Sibosado, quoted in Tess Allas, ‘Aalingoon (Rainbow Serpent)’, N Smith Gallery, 18 October 2019, <nsmithgallery.com/press/131-aalingoon-rainbow-serpent/>, viewed June 2024; Darrell Sibosado, quoted in Hetti Perkins, Kelli Cole, Peter Johnson and Aidan Hartshorn, ‘Darrell Sibosado’, 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2022; see <nga.gov.au/publications/ceremony/darrell-sibosado>, viewed June 2024.
3 Sibosado, quoted in Perkins.
4 Darrell Sibosado, quoted in ‘Darrell Sibosado’, 24th Biennale of Sydney: Ten Thousand Suns, <biennaleofsydney.art/participants/darrell-sibosado/>, viewed June 2024.
5 Darrell Sibosado, personal communication with the author, 11 June 2024.
6 Sibosado, quoted in Perkins.
