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[av_heading heading=’Doreen Chapman: Living to paint; painting to live’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote modern-centered’ subheading_active=” show_icon=” icon=’ue800′ font=” size=” av-medium-font-size-title=” av-small-font-size-title=” av-mini-font-size-title=” subheading_size=’15’ av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” icon_size=” av-medium-font-size-1=” av-small-font-size-1=” av-mini-font-size-1=” color=” custom_font=” icon_color=” margin=” margin_sync=’true’ padding=’10’ icon_padding=’10’ link=’manually,http://’ link_target=” id=” custom_class=” av_uid=’av-kp4yntsl’ admin_preview_bg=”][/av_heading]
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Manyjilyjarra artist Doreen Chapman’s bright and spirited paintings attest to a life lived and observed richly. Charlotte Middleton writes.
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The telling of stories is widely recognised as being of fundamental importance to Aboriginal culture. What, then, if a person has no means of hearing such stories, or indeed of speaking them?
Born in 1971 in the tiny Indigenous community of Jigalong in central Western Australia, Doreen Chapman has spent her life moving between Western Desert communities in the artistically fertile Pilbara region. Painting – unsurprisingly – became a crucial medium of communication and storytelling for the profoundly deaf and non-verbal Manyjilyjarra woman early in life. “No fishing, no hunting, no car,” recalls her mother Maywokka May Chapman of her daughter’s artistic beginnings. “Painting, painting every day.”
As an adult, Doreen has been primarily based in Warralong – a town 120km south-east of Port Hedland on the coast of WA. Beginning her professional artistic career with Martumili Artists in 2009, she banded together with other local women to create a large collaborative artwork to raise funds for the community. Doreen later joined the Spinifex Hill Studio, which, as Port Hedland’s only Aboriginal art collective, has grown from humble beginnings at the local Aboriginal church, to in recent years becoming one of the nation’s most dynamic indigenous art centres.
Spinifex Hill Studio is unique in Australia as a suburban-based art centre representing Aboriginal artists from numerous cultural backgrounds. From Monday to Friday, the studio opens to facilitate the practice of around twenty artists daily. With no dominant house style, the Studio supports an eclectic range of art practices in recognition of the diversity of Indigenous experience, with practices like Doreen’s showing significant evolution over the years.
Painting alongside her mother, Doreen shows a natural curiosity in the work of other artists who surround her but maintains a relentless rhythm and work ethic of her own.
“Doreen is extremely friendly, cheeky, helpful around the studio, and loves working with the team here,” says Faraday Boydell, Arts Development Coordinator at Spinifex Hill Studio. “She often asks us to print images for her to reference like a mood board – animals, plants and flowers, and other objects that you might see around town like helicopters and cars.”
Brimming with pastel colour and character, Doreen works to a generous scale. Using the superior powers of visual observation that you might expect of a person without hearing and speech, she has developed a distinctly loose and playful figurative style.
These days, Doreen keeps up a busy exhibition schedule, with work included in several group shows per year, as well as occasional solo exhibitions. Since 2015, her art has been shown across WA, Darwin, Melbourne, regional Victoria and NSW, and even as far as the US. Doreen has also taken home a number of awards, including the Cossack Art Prize in three consecutive years (2015-2017), prizes at the Hedland Art Awards two years in a row (2016, 2017), and Highly Commended in the Perth Royal Art Prize in 2019.
June 2021 will see Koskela Gallery in Sydney mount Doreen’s latest solo exhibition. “We began stocking Doreen’s lovely works within our Koskela Gallery in 2019,” says Zoe Sims, a proud Wiradjuri woman and the gallery’s Impact & Sustainability Coordinator. “We have wanted to show Spinifex Hill Studio work in our gallery for quite a while. The stars aligned when the Spinifex team reached out with the idea of a vibrant and charismatic solo show by Doreen and we are thrilled to present this series.”
Featured image: Doreen Chapman, Untitled. Acrylic on canvas, 91.5 x 122cm. Courtesy: the artist and Spinifex Hill Studio.
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