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Yellow Bus
Yellow Bus is a roving exposition of Yindjibarndi culture, housed in a vintage yellow bus.
This unique project is drawn from Lorraine Coppin’s lived experience as a child in the 1970’s, where a travelling bus would take community from Roebourne out to Yindjibarndi Country to learn and share culture. The Yellow Bus, as vehicle for cultural connection across generations, is here reimagined by Lorraine in collaboration with WA artist Andrew Sunley-Smith.
Travelling to Fremantle for the Biennale, the Yellow Bus will house a growing archive of Yindjibarndi culture, complete with significant objects, a seed bank, animations, interviews and more. Visitors to the bus will be transported to another time, another place, amidst immersive bush sounds, films of the era and a program of talks, screenings and sharings.
Warm by the fire, nourish in offerings of food and culture, and take part in this deeply intimate and powerful experience of Yindjibarndi communal history.
Date and Time
Bathers Beach (near Fleet Street), Fremantle
Thurs 9 Nov
6pm – Welcome and Film Screenings
Fri 10 Nov
11am – 2pm – Natural Dying, Shoemaking Workshops with Damper-Making (Register here)
Sat 11 Nov
10am – 6pm – Emu Dreaming Day
6pm – 8pm – Film Screenings
Sun 12 Nov
10am – 2pm – Cultural Storytelling with Judith Coppin and Emu Ornament Making Kids Workshop
Filmmaker, Archivist and Recorder of Cultural History and Knowledge, and Publisher, Lorraine Coppin with her partner, Michael Woodley, conceived and developed the Juluwarlu Group Aboriginal Corporation and Juluwarlu’s Archive, Language, Media and Cultural Centre in 2000 in Roebourne, WA. Over the past 20 years, Lorraine has created and coordinated Juluwarlu’s Cultural Mapping on Country projects, Women’s Culture and Language on Country Projects, undertaking the building of the nationally recognized Yindjibarndi Archive.
In 2017, in collaboration with senior Yindjibarndi Artists and Language workers Lorraine conceived and developed the Nyinyart Yinda Water Arts Language and Cultural Futures Project, establishing the Juluwarlu Artists Group and residency program to facilitate field trips and camps that have resulted in exciting intergenerational creative arts experiences and new skills for more than 30 senior and emerging artists and school age children. Projects include Painting New Ways, Stitched, dyed and printed linen art workshops, the revival of women’s traditional weaving skills using grasses from Yindjibarndi Country, Yarranga Marni carved boards, Creation Story Sculptures and Artefacts, and very large beautiful, hand-painted heavy canvas floor mats that map Yindjibarndi Country.
Andrew Sunley Smith is a UK and Australian artist residing in Fremantle, Western Australia. His practice encompasses and manifests the areas and diverse practices of pragmatic, co-efficient contemporary art and design, with a focus on the direct physical forms of relational aesthetics.
Andrew was a contributing lecturer for the MFA Environmental Art Studio programs at The Glasgow School of Art; Oxford Brookes University, UK; The University of Glasgow; the Bauhaus University, Weimer, Germany; the College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of New South Wales, Sydney; and Post Graduate supervisor with the School of Design, Creative Arts and Social Enquiry, Curtin University, Western Australia. Andrew is the currently the Creative Director of the contemporary art production space CP2O in Hamilton Hill, Western Australia – an independently funded communal facility which focuses on expansive, experimental creative practices. His work is held in the national collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), The University of Western Australia, The National Library of Australia, Canberra, and several notable private collections.
References and Links
Photographs courtesy of Roel Loopers.
Text from the Biennale program website.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 12 November, 2023 and hosted at freotopia.org/arts/biennale2023/yellowbus.html (it was last updated on 12 November, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.