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Sunday 3 October 2021

Sidney Nolan’s Africa: Interview With Andrew Turley

My latest interview for Artlyst is with Andrew Turley about his forthcoming book 'Nolan's Africa'. 

'Nolan’s Africa' will be the first book on Sidney Nolan written with access to the newly opened Sidney Nolan archives at the National Library of Australia, containing never-before-seen diaries, photographs and personal notes. These will be revealed by Andrew Turley – a former Army Captain and UN Peacekeeper deployed in Cambodia – who has walked in Nolan’s footsteps across Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania and Zanzibar. In Turley’s forthcoming book, influences and artistic process are laid bare – from the UN Headquarters in New York to the crematoria of Auschwitz and the plains of the Serengeti – a previously unrecorded history of Nolan’s art, themes, travels, experiences and relationships with thought leaders and politicians in a world at its most vulnerable.

'Nolan’s Africa' shines new light on Nolan and his examination of nature, human nature and the nature of mid-century Europe. For the first time, his responses are revealed to genocide, racial disenfranchisement, the decline of the West, the environment and our own existence threatened by nuclear war, changes in climate and the collapse of biodiversity.

'What did he make of those ideas? Art! His Italian crucifixes of 1955, crucifixions of 1957, then 1961 right through into the 1970s. The crucifixion motif was caustic in his Auschwitz paintings – graphic works of nailed figures, skeletons in wheelbarrows under smoking crosses and bodies laid out in neat rows. But these were works seen only by Nolan himself. In his African work, it became a spiritual image, but no one saw the whole picture. Did you know he had an ornate old wooden crucifix in his studio? It is still there on display.

Clark had written about the role religion played in a landscape of symbols and the art historical concept of paradise, the enclosed garden as a place to escape worldly fears and the Garden of Eden as a vision of hope. Sidney saw the enclosed ‘garden’ on the Serengeti Plains and Eden in Uganda. And there are few civilisations more connected to Christ and the crucifixion than Ethiopia, where he climbed barefoot and bloodied up rawhide ropes to explore a centuries-old monastery built into the cliff. He walked ancient churches whose walls were painted with scenes of the flight into Egypt and the Descent from the Cross; he took photos of rocky hillsides sown with old Coptic crosses and saw, high on a dusty hill, a man in a tattered robe silhouetted against the sky, standing still, arms horizontal along with staff across his shoulders. Sidney called him “A walking crucifixion."'

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Die Heuwels Fantasties ft. The Soweto Gospel Choir, HHP & JR - Our Heritage.
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