Miriam Cosic, The Australian 11-12 August, 2007

The prize for three-dimensional work, named in memory of the artist and elder most Wandjuk Marika and usually awarded for funerary poles from Arnhem Land, was this year given to Laurie Nilson, an artist from western Queensland, for an installation of three emus made of moulded barbed wire.

An environmental piece which operates on many levels, Goolburris on the Bungil Creek sprang from Nilson’s memory of coming across 40 emus in one day lying dead or dying after strangling themselves on barbed-wire fences while trying to reach water.

Laurie Nilsen is a respected Queensland artist who’s work is centrally concerned with the environment and the politics of Aboriginality. He has exhibited widely nationally and internationally and his work is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia along with many other public and private collections.

Interviewed by the ABC, “The pieces produced now may not easily fit into the category of traditional or ‘serious’ sculptures. But to me they are far more serious! As I get older and with a lot of political artworks behind me I’ve realised the powerful tool we have when mixing art and political comment …. I’m from Roma in western Queensland. I’ve been an artist on and off since I was about 15, but more serious over the last 15 years. A lot of my art deals with Aboriginal culture, about my people, or sometimes political or environmental issues. I am mainly concentrating on sculpture now.”

ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT
“Some of my work deals with the environment, especially some of the environmental issues. That’s one of the reasons why I started to do the big life size emus made out of barbed wire, because it’s the barbed wire that kills them. I’ve seen in places, when I’ve been working in the bush or just travelling back out to home to spend a bit of time, especially during the drought time when the emus are trying to get to the water holes and they’re all fenced off. They’re not like a kangaroo that can either jump over or crawl under. They seem to just pace up and down the fence and then they decide to step through and a lot of them get caught up in the top two strands, they twist over and their leg just gets caught and they lay there till they die.

“I mentioned to you earlier about coming across 40-odd different emus in a fence line one day, some of them had been dead for a week, it was a really bad drought about 10 years ago, and some were on their last sort of dying stages. It was a pretty horrific thing for me to have to go along and put them out of their misery. There wasn’t much sense me untangling them and most of them weren’t going to survive anyway, or none of them were going to survive, so you just don’t like to see things suffer like that. It’s probably the hardest thing I had to do was to go along and put them out of their misery. You would have liked to have been able to cut the fences down and let them all into the dam, but, yes. So those pieces, I quite enjoy doing them. Like I said, they’re life size and they’re made out of barbed wire, the thing that kills them, so it’s almost like a regeneration or, yes, reincarnating them again. I don’t think I’ll ever get around to making as many as I’ve seen perish but.

“I grew up using barbed wire, fencing you know, and it’s one of them things, if you grab it by the scruff of the neck it won’t bite you but, yes, if you be a little bit tentative it always seems to get you. But just a solid week and a half or two weeks of handling barbed wire it’s inevitable that you’re just going to – it’s almost like sandpapering all the fingerprints off. So you need another month to get over them. Yes, it’s sort of like your little sacrifice that you have to spill a little bit of blood