Wayne Youle | National Fuckin’ Treasure: SPRING1883
Wayne Youle has worked on both sides of the Tasman, exploring and paying homage to our countries’ most significant artists. Youle’s interest in Sidney Nolan’s series of paintings on Ned Kelly started during his three-month residency at Artspace in Sydney in 2012, when he saw the exhibition Sidney Nolan: Illuminations at the State Library. Since then, he has occasionally created imagery about the 19th century bushranger, incorporating familiar motif from Nolan’s paintings, such as Kelly’s homemade iron helmet reduced to a black rectangle with a slit for the eyes, or the ranger’s silhouetted back as he is seen riding off into the distance.
After producing a series of work (Elevation) for the Colin McCahon Residency in 2019, which reflected on McCahon’s importance within New Zealand’s art history, Youle moved straight into NFT, shifting his attention to an Australian icon. He could instantly see similarities between the artists; Nolan and McCahon were both seminal in the evolution of modernism in their respective countries. They produced large bodies of work that firmly rooted their paintings within the artistic landscapes of their countries, and both produced iconography which became instantly recognisable and emblematic of their practices. Indeed, Nolan’s depictions of Ned Kelly – the most celebrated paintings in his oeuvre and to which the artist is most closely associated – with his black helmet and its letterbox slit, are among the most recognisable symbols in Australian art history.
The legend of Ned Kelly as a lovable rouge, as someone who evaded justice and ultimately became an Australian hero, had great appeal to Youle. He could see a shared sensibility within New Zealand culture; the elevation of a criminal to a folk-hero has also been celebrated in a series of works by Trevor Moffitt about sheep drover James McKenzie. Although, unlike Nolan and Moffitt, no overt narrative weaves its way through the works in NFT. Youle uses the series instead to reflect on the idea of the character becoming bigger than the story. In Youle’s works, Ned Kelly and his helmet become a caricature of Nolan’s version, broken down to a simplified, almost comic book style rendering. That the viewer can nevertheless instantly tell who the paintings depict, demonstrates the power of the image; we don’t need the narrative setting or the stark Australian landscape of Nolan’s works to convey the story, the helmet is enough.
That’s not to say that Youle’s series is without a story, however. Youle’s Ned Kelly pops up in front of a variety of backdrops; the blue sky and clouds of NFT I (Big Clouds) evoking the vast open skies familiar in Australian landscape and seen in many of Nolan’s works. In NFT IV (Jail bird), Ned is transported inside the Melbourne Gaol where, finally captured, he spent his final days in 1883 before being hanged for the murder of a policeman; the familiar black eyes peering out between the bars of his cell. The same gaze follows the viewer in NFT II (Look Left, Look Right) where Youle plays on the idea of surveillance of CCTV cameras; the box-like form of Ned Kelly simulating the guise of a hidden camera.
It’s the title of the exhibition, however, that perfectly surmises Wayne Youle the artist and the person. So often his works are based on anecdotes or personal experience, and NFT is just that. During the viewing of Illuminations, Youle was cornered by a drunk patron who wanted to give him his opinion on Nolan: ‘that guy is a National Fuckin’ Treasure’. The quintessentially Australian phrase, that so perfectly summed up Nolan and his significance for Australian art stuck with Wayne, and it’s still relevant almost a decade later.
