“We only want the world to accept and respect our culture… and how strongly we feel about being allowed to remain ourselves.” -- Paddy Japaljarri Sims and fellow Warlpiri artists, 1989, explaining their installation at the Pompidou Center, Paris  
     
 
Synopsis: Too Many Japaljarris is a one hour film documenting the tumultuous, yet triumphant life and work of Australian Aboriginal elder and internationally acclaimed fine artist, Paddy Japaljarri Sims. In 2002, 85-year-old Paddy Sims takes an emotional journey ‘out bush’, gathering inspiration for a collaborative painting project rooted in the creation mythologies or Dreamings of his ancestral homelands. This road trip with friends, family, and fellow artists provokes the reliving of rituals and memories which illuminate Paddy’s emblematic life story, a journey from ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer to cultural ambassador from the oldest living culture to the modern world.

The film explores the convergence between modern art and ancient Dreamings, between the personal and the universal. As Paddy Sims’ and his ‘mob’ journey through the majestic gum trees and sere grassy scrub of his traditional country, the artists set to work - in parallel time - on the large, starry canvas, destined for a European museum. Munga or Night Sky Dreaming depicts the creation story of how the stars were placed in the Milky Way. As the bush trip progresses, still photographs and archival footage elicit Paddy’s remarkable life story, and body of work: powerful paintings and installations asserting Warlpiri culture’s rightful place in the world. 		 
     

 

 

 

A Bush Trip with Japaljarri

Production Stiils, part 1

   Theme: Paddy Japaljarri Sims’ life story neatly encapsulates the cultural challenges precipitated by Aboriginal contact with an overtly racist European Australia. Born circa 1917 and “raised up” out bush in the inaccessible Tanami Desert, Paddy lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle until ‘brought in’ by camel-riding missionaries in the 1940’s. Years later, in the 1980’s, Paddy and his bush-reared generation founded the contemporary painting movement at Yuendumu. Painting on canvas became both a reassertion of time-honored cultural values and a reaffirmation of links to traditional lands, from which the Warlpiri had been cut off during an era of coerced settlement and forcible assimilation.  
 

For the Warlpiri, who have no written language, paintings now serve as cultural documents, encoding personal history, connection to country, and deeply felt spiritual beliefs. Painting is a contemporary way of recording and passing on Warlpiri culture to future generations.

In examining the inspiration for Paddy Sims’ landmark painting, Munga or Night Sky Dreaming, through the lens of the artist’s experience, Too Many Japaljarris illumines the issues of land, social identity, memory, and aesthetics threaded through the fabric of Aboriginal art. The film is a testament to the indomitable spirit of Paddy Sims, and his struggle to insure his culture’s survival. Voices such as Paddy’s are extinguished with each passing year—the world will surely be diminished by their absence. But his paintings remain an inspiration.

  

 

 

 

Painting a Collaborative Canvas

Productiuon Stills, part 2

 

 

 
         

     
   
     
     
 

Treatment: Too Many Japaljarris crosscuts between the painting of a large canvas commissioned for a European Museum, the events of Paddy Sims’ life, and a ritual homecoming journey, all informed by the artist’s Dreamings and his deep connection to his ancestral homelands. 400 kilometers northwest of Alice Springs, at Yuendumu’s Warlukurlangu Art Center, dark and dusty hands transform a blank canvas into pulsating patterns of blues, purples, whites, and pinks. Three aboriginal elders — Paddy Japaljarri Stewart, Sheila Napaljarri Brown, and Paddy Japaljarri Sims —sit cross-legged on the paint-spattered porch, hunched over a large canvas. Inspired by Munga or Night Sky Dreaming, the painting will depict the creation story of how the stars were placed in the Milky Way. The canvas will take a week to complete, while camp dogs doze and the artists’ swap stories and joke in a soothing drone of Pidgin English and Warlpiri.

The endless Australian bush flashes by – tumbledown rock formations and drooping desert oaks. Red dust billows behind a three-truck convoy. Paddy Sims rides up front, directing the bush trip, his worn, lively face and creased hands an analog for the craggy, eroded countryside. As this journey unfolds, the contours of Paddy Sims’ remarkable life emerge. Stories and interviews are interwoven with rare still photographs and archival footage, providing the stark, majestic landscape with the texture of human experience.

Meanwhile, colorful passages of bead-like dots accrete on the canvas, like windblown sand hills in the desert. Shimmering stars appear in a central black void. The painting takes shape — both a landscape and a starscape — mirroring the spatial and spiritual journey into the bush. Camp dogs erupt in barks and howls and then settle down again; fellow elders from the ‘art center mob,’ their eyes shaded by the broad, bent brims of ten-gallon hats shamble over to the canvas for a closer look.

And the bush trip progresses, with visits to Paddy’s sacred sites. Friends and family gather bush yams and feast on kangaroo tails. The ‘mob’ sings and dances their Dreamings by firelight in a dusty creek bed as dingoes howl at the moon, echoing a Neolithic bush past, barely fifty years gone. This connection is vividly made through dissolves into archival footage and composite graphic re-creations.

Near the journey’s end, and the painting’s completion, Paddy’s ‘mob’ reaches a sacred site key to the Night Sky Dreaming. Paddy re-enacts the dance moves his vanished Japaljarri brothers performed to lift the stars up into the Milky Way. As he sings his Dreaming, Paddy suddenly breaks down, remembering his lost kinsmen, who once roamed this remote and desolate country. After this remarkable catharsis, Paddy divulges never before revealed information about the Night Sky Dreaming. That this no-longer-performed ritual brought on the change of seasons, “making the nights shorter,” and the days longer, insuring the seasonal renewal of nature and binding the human and natural orders.

At the film’s end, the vivid colors of Munga, Night Sky Dreaming shimmer in the collective imagination on the stark white walls of Utrecht’s Aboriginal Art Museum. The painting memorializes Paddy Sims’ life, his culture, and his artistic attempt to connect all humanity.

  
     
     
  Contact information: David Betz, curator@aboriginal-art.com 415-871-5901