Iltja Ntjarra artists and the making of contemporary lumen prints: documentation, display and storage

Abstract

Mparra Karrti—Us mob belong to the Country, is the collective title attributed to a series of twenty-two lumen prints on paper with watercolour media, produced by Central Desert region artists. The artists work out of the Iltja Ntjarra (Many Hands) Art Centre in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) with their practices inherited and learned through lineage traced back to Albert Namatjira and the Hermannsburg School of watercolour painting. The artists’ novel approach to painting in watercolour on photo-sensitised paper resulted in a unique visual aesthetic of cockling throughout the sheets, requiring that the works be presented ‘floating’ on the wall with no mounting visible. This technical paper details the innovative approaches used by the artists in making these distinctive works and the subsequent methodologies applied by the Art Gallery of NSW team in preparing them for display in The National 2019: new Australian Art. The paper highlights the importance of knowledge sharing amongst artists, facilitators, curators, conservators and wider teams to ensure both the physical and intrinsic values of such works are fully acknowledged and understood.