Lorraine Connelly-Northey, a contemporary Aboriginal artist whose work I discovered a few months ago, has a new exhibition in Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi on Flinders Lane. Should you find yourself in the vicinity, check it out. Here are photos of two recent works from the gallery website - Possum Skin Cloak (above, 135 x 196) and Narrbong (string bag, 42 x 10) - 
but if you can see these things in real life, it's worth a journey. If not, at least click on the pics (especially the one above), and look at the other works on the website.Connelly-Northey's work makes traditional Aboriginal objects out of found metal, the detritus of the society which introduced fences to this land. Besides being very beautiful (there's a lovely glass case of her narrbongs in the Indigenous Galleries at the NGV, first thing on the left as you come in) it is somehow very profound. These bags and purses are useless for holding things or keeping you warm, but she's saying more than that traditional forms of life are hard if not impossible to maintain anymore. The way she makes them from materials she gathers evokes her ancestors' making them of grasses and animal pelts; it keeps the traditions alive without pretending the world hasn't changed. With their resourcefulness and imagination, wisdom and resilience, one might be able to find and make beauty and meaning even in the post-industrial wasteland of the present.
