Gregory Pryor
Huddle

HUDDLE

An exhibition of new work, including two major collaborative works with Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama.

​

When a group of people find themselves in the remote and wide-open spaces of an unfamiliar landscape, they don’t have many choices. They can keep moving in the hope that they will encounter something familiar or they can stay put and hope that the familiar comes to them. There are also choices that each individual needs to consider: Should I make my own decisions about what to do, or should I engage with the group and be part of a collective decision? The group may then decide to disperse, or they may decide to come together in a huddle. 

 

This action of a group of people merging can have ambiguous intentions or outcomes. People may huddle out of fear, a primal response to each individual’s vulnerability when alone and exposed. By turning their focus inwards, they shut out the real or imagined threats outside. The huddle can also enclose secrets, or information that the outside world is not privy to, and like a football team in a half-time huddle, the leader, or ‘coach’ may impart instructions into the heart of the huddle, as a way of vanquishing their opponents. In this way, a huddle can form a mass of collective clarity, strength, and will.

​

Who might be the opponents or enemy here, out in the remote open spaces of the Yilgarn craton? Is it the open space itself? Is it the people who understand this open space better than them? Or is the enemy within?

​

In these paintings, people huddle, trees huddle and then there is the huddle of paint, as it migrates across the canvas looking for other patches to form conglomerates of meaning.

​

This exhibition also includes two new major collaborations with Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama. The large-scale Ngalak Wonga consists of 200 painted and mixed media canvas panels, that consist of 100 shared stories in text and image. It has been the result of a dialogic process in trust and respect of each other and the decision to share their lived experience that have been affected and even shaped in different ways by the persistent tendrils of a colonial past. The two artists met twice a week online, to firstly read out their stories (handwritten on the same sized piece of canvas), then to share the corresponding image attached to the text. The responses to each other ’s work are not necessarily and directly associative but slowly address complex and confronting colonial events through a positioning of strength-based story telling as a decolonising gesture.

​

Extracts from the Red List (Mother Mo) is an installation highlighting the 76 most endangered eucalyptus species identified in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, which categorises the extinction risk of the world’s biota. A large-
scale text work by Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama provides an indigenous context and contrast to a collection of 76 remaindered library periodical boxes that have been substantially altered through silverfish infestation.

​

About Gregory Pryor

​

Gregory Pryor is an artist, writer and academic based in Boorloo, Perth, Western Australia. From a background in painting and drawing, his practice has also explored a diverse range of other media, often in relationship to the localised demands of a given project. The cultural discourse between the West and the East continues to inform his work and since arriving in Western Australia in 2003, post-colonial dialogues have played an important role in a number of exhibitions. There is a strong emphasis on place and the role that botanicaldiversity and loss plays in shaping the landscape – particularly the ancient landscapes of the South West of
Western Australia. His work is featured in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, The National Gallery of Victoria, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, The Queensland Art Gallery and numerous important corporate and private collections. Pryor is the Academic Lead in visual art at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia.

​

About Dr Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama

​

Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama is an artist, writer, and academic based in Undalup, Busselton, Western Australia. Drawing on her Wardandi and Koreng Noongarancestry, personal story, and the spirit of Country, her work often takes poetic and embodied forms that reflect on interconnectedness, perspective, grief, resilience, and cultural renewal. She is particularly interested in language, weaving Koreng Noongar words from her family into herwriting as an act of revival and continuity. Her practice, spanning writing, visual art andcollaborative projects, is grounded in the power of storytelling to reframe knowledge andcreate new ways of seeing and understanding. She is Academic Lead of Indigenous Knowledges in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, where she works to decolonise and indigenise the curriculum, fostering conversations between Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander perspectives and Western academic traditions.