In every one of Freddie Timms’s hundreds of paintings, the 62-year-old Kununurra artist recreates the beloved country which he rode thorough as a young stockman. Swirls of colour – some produced from ochres from the land itself – represent the hills, black soil and hot springs he remembers from his days as a 14-year-old, being taught to ride on Mabel Downs Station by one of the elders of his Gidja language group.
“At night, we’d sit around a campfire and tell stories,” he recalls. “There was lots of good food in the bush – emu, goanna, kangaroo, crocodile, fish, bush plum and bush turkey and sugar-bag, or native honey.
“They were good days. And I remember that country and everything that happened there. I remember everything.”
One of Mr Timms’ latest paintings, Wanubi Spring has its own magic. It shows Mr Timms’ liam (deep feeling) for his country.
And in a world first, extra magic has been supplied by a UWA finishing PhD student, Rachel Green. Ms Green, along with her supervisor Professor John Watling in the Centre for Forensic Science, has developed a way to protect artworks in the battle against art fraud.
Her technology encodes artists’ work with an invisible ‘chemical fingerprint’, thereby safeguarding Australia’s Indigenous art from fraudulent copiers and ensuring it maintains its rightful position in the international art market.
“These artworks are now being recognised by international collectors and are fast becoming extremely lucrative investments,” Ms Green said.
“The explosion of interest in Indigenous artists and their artwork, both at a domestic and at an international level is, however, a double-edged sword.
“Greater awareness and appreciation of the quality and cultural significance of the artwork means that the price investors are willing to pay for genuine works has increased substantially.
“As a result, there has been a growth in black market forgeries and in the production of fake copies.”
“Fraudulent artworks are not only demeaning to the implicated artist, but as the stories often represented in the art are passed from generation to generation, forged works represent an insult to Indigenous culture.”
By adapting a technique her supervisor, Professor Watling, developed to trace the origins of gold, diamonds and even the ink and paper of ransom notes, Ms Green uses laser ablation and mass spectrometry to analyse the chemical components of microscopic particles of pigment ochre and paint without harming the artwork.
She can pinpoint the source of ochre from quarries within 50 km of each other and identify a specific manufacturer and batch of paint.
She has also developed a method of chemically encoding the paint and canvas so that the artist, and even the time of production, can be unambiguously identified.
(Wanubi Spring has been bequeathed to the University and is in the Berndt Museum.)
Written by Sally-Ann Jones for UWA News, October 2008
