William Mackinnon: Crossroads in the Desert
Image credit: William Mackinnon, Our secret history, 2019, acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen, 160 x 220 cm. Courtesy of Philip Bacon Galleries.
Following a year-long residency in 2009 at Mankaja Arts in the central Kimberley town of Fitzroy Crossing, William Mackinnon spent the following year working as a field officer for the Alice Springs-based Arts organisation Papunya Tula. The job took him to the remote Indigenous communities of Papunya, Kintore and Kiwirrkurra, hundreds of kilometres west of Alice. These encounters remade Mackinnon as an artist, stripping away the preoccupations of the contemporary art world and the notion that painting had reached a dead end. He says of his experiences during this time that he was “blown away and blown apart,” confronted by “things you can’t access because you don’t have the cognitive wiring for it.”
The Kimberley experience and the iconography of that country – boab trees, termite mounds, broken-down cars, endless roads across enigmatic, unstable terrain – were more readily incorporated into the psychological landscapes/dreamscapes of Mackinnon’s signature style. The western desert communities were something else. They existed in an alternative reality, where the objects and materials of ordinary Australian society were adapted to the needs of an interim world that occupied a space somewhere between entropy and imagination. The psychological undercarriage of the dreamscape paintings belonged to a cognitive realm that had no traction in these provisional desert settlements. Yet the people, the country, the paintings had a visceral authenticity that demanded an equally authentic response. Daily life presented cameos and tableaus that no artist could invent.
“What was in front of me, what it made me feel, was impossible to ignore. It was humbling. It took the ego out of the equation, it took the artworld out of the equation. What’s left is what comes out.”
Image credit: William Mackinnon, Sitting with Naata Nungurrayi, 2019, acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen, 160 x 220cm Courtesy of Philip Bacon Galleries.
The paintings in this exhibition have their origins in the first response paintings Mackinnon made between 2009 and 2011. Those unmediated early works provide the raw material Mackinnon draws on again and again as he revisits the irreducible images and the dissonance they engender – the abandoned cars and termite mounds, the derelict houses, the weeping desert skies, the camp dogs, the hooded figures, footballers, gamblers, artists. Mackinnon uses repetition to work through ideas, employing an image as many times as it takes to see what it yields up. As works evolve they lose the immediacy of the original studies and acquire layers of ambiguity. One could follow the evolution of ‘Community’, the single example of the early works included in this exhibition, to its latest iteration as ‘Our secret history’. The hooded adolescent figures, the rain-drenched sky, the Madonna statue embedded in a tyre, the derelict house with eye socket holes, absorb the subsequent paintings of hooded figures and sparser landscapes, the addition of camp dogs and a third, barely visible figure.
By the time the time the painting has become ‘Our Secret History’ the figures are foregrounded and centred, obscuring, possibly stalking a third child. The hoodies have acquired Ku Klux Klan peaks, and a pack of camp dogs patrol the ground between the derelict house and the Madonna. A line of washing adds a touch of suburban ordinariness, countered by the pair of conjoined dogs in the middle distance. With time, memory, and multiple reworkings, the image has acquired an inscrutable, unsettling intensity only hinted at in the original.
Image credit: William Mackinnon, The purple house, 2019, acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen, 150 x 300cm . Courtesy of Philip Bacon Galleries.
‘The Purple House’ has its beginnings in the same 2009 series, The Lucky Country, with the same derelict houses and stranded Madonna. In the current version a figure walks nonchalantly, hands in pockets, face and torso concealed by a skeleton hoodie, beside a red dirt track that divides burned from unburned ground. The track sweeps past a blue house with washing on the line and a derelict purple house that gives the work its title, a nod to the Alice Springs organisation that services remote community dialysis treatment. In the middle distance a woman in pink and two children stand on the burned ground. There’s a white sedan, and gum trees, and a sand dune that brings the horizon close. The colour is brilliant and the shadows are long. The cognitive dissonance produced by the perfect composition of droll, weird and ordinary lands with a light but lasting touch.
Most of the paintings feature cars, sometimes as the subject, sometimes as background. Some are functional, most are not. They are the ubiquitous symbol of remote Indigenous life, representing the crossed purposes and misalignments between the world that builds and resources the communities and the people who live in them.
Image credit: William Mackinnon, Crossroads, 2019,acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen, 200 x 300cm . Courtesy of Philip Bacon Galleries.
‘Crossroads’ could stand as a metaphor for the impact on Mackinnon of the world the painting represents. The first time I wrote about this work I reflected on the function of the motorcar in desert society – mobility, of course, to attend football matches, funerals, royalty meetings, to go hunting and fishing and shopping, to do grog runs and family trips – but also as symbols of contingency and optimism, that the Landcruiser propped on tyres and wheel rims will one day drive again, when the parts and tyres can be procured, the fuel begged or borrowed. The burned-out sedan is a recurring image, explored by Mackinnon in a series called ‘Whitegoods’ in the early works. One might assume that the cars have burned as the result of road accidents, but it’s more likely the result of a theatrical gesture made by the vehicle’s owner, torching the object of desire to deflect jealousy and criticism. Or a car waiting, like the Landcruiser, for tyres and fuel, left long enough for the grass to grow under it and be ignited by a lightning strike or hunting fire or cigarette butt.
Mackinnon’s latest work, ‘Toyota canvas/the stranger’,painted during a recent stint in Ibiza, offers an additional interpretation. A Landcruiser floats upside-down, collaged onto a painting of football players heading onto the field, pumped and eager, indifferent to the overturned vehicle with its blank horizon and European number plate.
Image credit: William Mackinnon, Toyota canvas/The stranger, 2025, acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen,150 x 200cm . Courtesy of Philip Bacon Galleries.
The title suggests that here the Toyota is a symbol of disorientation and dislocation, the outsider/stranger/artist a visitant from another reality. Mackinnon says of creating the work, “I feel like the Toyota, again dislocated from ‘home’ country as I was in the central desert. Everything topsy turvy. Painting to save my skin and to survive.” That the Toyota continues to serve as a metaphor for displacement reflects the staying power of the original experience. To revisit the immobilised Toyota in Crossroads is to see the bushy-tailed young fieldworker brought up short, the wheels come off the enterprise, the red dirt track leading to a destination that can’t be reached by ordinary means.
Like the motorcar, money is subject to the boom-and-bust ecology of the desert, and acquiring it demands the same investment of energy as hunting and gathering food once did. Paul Virilio says, in The Aesthetics of Disappearance, “Number games, like Lotto or the Lottery, with their disproportionate winnings, connote disobedience to society’s laws, exemption from taxes, immediate redressment of poverty.” Gambling is the desert equivalent of the lottery, with the same connotations of exemption and disobedience, and the prospect of winning enough to buy a motorcar, or a packet of tobacco.
Image credit: William Mackinnon, The gamblers, 2019, acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen, 160 x 220cm . Courtesy of Philip Bacon Galleries.
The gambling circle is a common sight in the desert settlements, especially on art centre money days and when Centrelink payments arrive. After big royalty payouts the card-games can last for weeks. In ‘The Gamblers’, a wheel-less caravan is elevated on a raft of bedframes and tyres like a makeshift ark, drifting with its cargo of dogs and gamblers, and its entourage of flotsam and jetsam, on the choppy tide of a world where to obey the laws of one society is to disobey the laws of another.
One of the few activities where the rules, if not the laws, translate across the faultline is football. AFL is a game for warriors, and is played with skill and enthusiasm across the country. Sports weekends are among the biggest events on the desert calendar.
Image credit: William Mackinnon, Kiwikurra blues, 2019, acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen, 130 x 180cm : William Mackinnon, Kintore sports weekend, 2025,acrylic, oil and automotive enamel on linen, 110 x 90cm . Courtesy of Philip Bacon Galleries.
Mackinnon’s football paintings retain the freshness and immediacy of the first response works – the dynamic choreography between the players, their attention fixed on the suspended ball, the watchers perched on car boots and bonnets, the luminous, mutating landscape, the ricochet of colour against colour. In these paintings the footballers hold the radical instability of their world in balance, and the artist paints a world he can enter without filters. Even in ‘Toyota canvas/the stranger’, the team is too focussed on the game ahead to be distracted by the angst-ridden avatar hovering on the periphery of their brotherhood.
A recurrent motif in Mackinnon’s repertoire is the world outside perceived from within – a cave, a derelict building, a darkened room – all versions of the artist’s consciousness as it attempts to process what it sees. The world seen from the graffiti-covered interior of ‘The world is as you are/dark studio’ is as insubstantial as a mirage; the adolescent pair in ‘Loss of Innocence’ walk away into nothingness, fragments snagged in the memory bank of unassimilated images.
Thrown into a reappraisal of his own work, and of painting in general, it was not only Mackinnon’s subject matter that underwent radical change, but his approach to the processes and materials that made a painting. Witnessing the opportunistic adaptations and repurposing of resources opened up new possibilities. He used the skins of acrylic paint peeled from dried-out paint containers to create the surfaces of car wrecks, rolled tyres through paint and printed their tread onto the canvas.
“Working in the Kimberley and Central Desert with these old masters smashed any notion of everything being done…I still find new ways to use paint – liquid nails and glitter and unconventional and traditional materials.”
This experimentation is evident in ‘Sitting with Naata Nungurrayi’, a work which also has several earlier iterations. In this version the landscape is as featureless as the canvas on which the old painter contemplates making her first mark, the sky unprimed raw canvas. The paint containers hold recycled paint skins, the tyre in the bottom corner is the rolled imprint of a painted tyre, the Birkenstock treads are printed from the soles of Birkenstocks. It’s a painting about the language and meaning of painting, an encounter at the cultural and cognitive interface. Mackinnon the neophyte stares intently at the master painter, waiting for her to bring the country into being.
In ‘Burke and Wills’ Mackinnon perfected the technique he had long worked at to render termite mounds convincingly, grinding back layers of modelling paste, spraying the 3D surfaces with acrylic. The painting is a masterwork of experimentation, using charcoal washes on raw canvas, liquid nails, collaged canvas strips, along with more traditional materials. It serves as a coda to the show, invoking the explorer narrative as a symbol of the clash of civilisations. Monumental in scale and ambition, it exemplifies the visionary folly it critiques. The shining path disappearing into the horizon floats above a monochrome landscape to which it has little connection, intersecting the strips of linen that represent a 4WD track. It’s a deliberately constructed symbolic world, the only trace of human presence the abandoned cars. The purple boab tree asserts a fizzing gravitational pull, dragging the wrecked cars into the vortex of its energy field, and termite mounds hunker into the terrain, sentient as brains.
The improvised persistence of the remote Indigenous world has scorched itself into the artist’s psyche, its imagery continuing to smoulder and flare into new attempts to give it form. Mackinnon brings his artist’s eye and his painter’s skills and his own improvised persistence to the project of an authentic encounter between ways of being.
To make work so close to the cultural coalface is a risky enterprise. As a non-Indigenous artist Mackinnon lays himself open to the accusation that he is appropriating images of Aboriginal people and places for his own purposes, trespassing into a cultural domain to which he has no right. His defence, and his strength, is that he has already laid himself open to being continuously undone and remade through the act of painting. And through the act of painting he achieves a flickering, episodic communication across the gulf between the world of William Mackinnon and the world of Naata Nungurrayi.
