Meet the cast
An unlikely friendship inspires Change, shared knowledge and culture. Both are driven by their ancestors’ legacies and a personal commitment to the Ocean.
ALICK TIPOTI
Alick Tipoti is one of the Torres Strait Islands’ most well-known artists and a highly respected leader in regenerating cultural knowledge, practices, and language.
His art interprets traditional cosmology and how local customs of chant, music, song, dance, storytelling, and visual art encode important survival knowledge about the marine environment. Art historically played a vital role in oral cultures of the region where collective memory relied on cultural rather that written forms. All of the artforms work together in Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait) cultures. They consolidate sensory knowledge about island life into a resource for the sustainable wellbeing of the community and the environment. Tipoti’s art regenerates this sensory knowledge and creates awareness that it involves a useful form of marine science.
Tipoti was born on Wayben (Waiben, Thursday Island). His parents came from Badhu (Badu, Mulgrave Island) in Maluyligal (Western Torres Strait) where the artist spent his childhood. Talented craftsmen and artists were common in Tipoti’s family, and he learned artistic skills from his father and grandfather. Formal art training followed at Wayben, and then the Tropical North Queensland Institute of Technical and Further Education in Cairns where he learnt from the gifted teacher, Anna Eglitis. Tipoti then completed a Bachelor of Visual Art [Printmaking] at the Australian National University in Canberra.
At the latter institution Tipoti acquired skills from two of Australia’s leading Master Printmakers, Basil Hall and Theo Tremblay. During his studies Tipoti also commenced academic research into cultural heritage archives held in Cambridge University’s Haddon Collection.
Few Australian artists cover the artistic scope of Tipoti’s practice. He creates chants, music, and choreography, and performs in his own dance troupe called Zugubal Traditional Torres Strait Islands Dance Group. The Group performed in London in 2015 in conjunction with the British Museum’s exhibition Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilization [23 April - 2 August 2015]. He is one of Australia’s leading printmakers and also creates sculptures, ceremonial masks and instruments, assemblage pieces, and public artworks.
Tipoti understands his traditional culture as a sophisticated body of knowledge that is simultaneously a worldview, a science, and a system of spiritual belief. When we enter the visual cosmos of Tipoti’s art, we begin to understand the Maluyligal perspective of how all dimensions of human experience are implicated in one another.
- Sally Butler, Taba Naba brochure
HIS SERENE HIGHNESS PRINCE ALBERT II OF MONACO
From H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco, on the launch of Taba Naba exhibition at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco where he first met the artist, Alick Tipoti.
“During my travels I have discovered Aboriginal and Oceanic art; genuine sacred pathways through myths and dreams and the harsh reality of humanity’s tenuous link with nature.
“The Oceanographic Museum wanted to celebrate this imaginative and colourful art with an exhibition entitled ‘Taba Naba’, the title of a traditional Torres Strait Islander children’s song recounting the relationship between a child and the sea. The Museum was thus inviting us on a voyage of discovery. I was pleased to be able to lend several works from my private collection to highlight my admiration for these artists who have been able to express, in such a unique way, the urgent need to protect the environment and the oceans.
“The Oceanographic Museum was created by my great- grandfather, Prince Albert I, as a temple dedicated to the sea and a meeting point for Science and Art, the ‘two driving forces of civilisation’
“Contemporary art is a great vehicle for drawing attention to the dangers that threaten us. The artworks are true advocates for the preservation of marine ecosystems and are particularly powerful when viewed in the rooms of the Oceanographic Museum; creating a living dialogue across our collections. Using a wide variety of media (painting, sculpture, photography, video, masks, headdresses, etc.) and materials (wood, metal, plastic, fishing nets, etc.), these works alert us to the importance of nature; the risks of climate change and the devastation we inflict on our environment through overfishing, pollution and plastic waste. They are an invitation to change our habits. ”
