OM2 Ros Moriarty

Biography

Ros Moriarty is Designer & Managing Director of Balarinji Studio, the country’s leading contemporary indigenous art and design group, that markets its work both in Australia and internationally.

Born in Tasmania, Ros is a graduate of the Australian National University. Ros was formerly a journalist with Radio Australia in indigenous affairs, women’s issues and the environment. She has also held senior positions with Australian Volunteers Abroad and the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra and Sydney.

Balarinji works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Flinders University Art Museum, the Powerhouse Museum of Design, Sydney, and the Centre for Contemporary Graphic Art (CGGA) in Fukuoka, Japan.

Interpreting Visual Language: Aboriginal Australia.

An essay by R.M.

{12th of October 2005}

Australian Aboriginal imagery has always had a communication function over and above the aesthetic. In a world where ritual and function are inextricably intertwined, and language is an oral tradition, the pictorial language of visual signage keeps people connected.

The diametric opposition between Indigenous and Western approaches to art, applies equally to signage. While a Western artist might often create a work to hang in a permanent location, to be reviewed and assessed, judged and acclaimed, the immediacy of Indigenous art making has no such aspirations. Whether gouged from rock on an inaccessible cliff face, scattered in ochre on the ceremony ground, or slathered in river clay on an initiate’s body, patterns and symbols are about the meaning of the moment. Their spontaneous beauty lacks artifice or self-interest. The very act of their creation is to pass knowledge, re-enact process, ensure meaning will pass to each new generation.

Need determines function, and Australia was traditionally a fragile, difficult place in which to live. Vast distances, geographical and climatic extremes, delicately maintained balance of natural resources were the challenge of family and clan groups whose Law charged them with protection of the land.

Enduring knowledge of preserving the continent for maybe 100,000 years was enshrined in the symbols of Aboriginal visual language handed down through both ceremony and daily life. Understanding the symbols, and the stories behind them, were the maps, the clues, to observing the Law, and reaping the benefits of a life lived in harmony with the elements and the cosmos. The distilled simplicity of concentric dotted circles, linear motifs of game and wildlife, and lithe human forms, perhaps attained an unintentional aesthetic by virtue of projecting the essence of necessity.