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Artist Profile: Karen Mills
Issue 55 - 12 May 2004
By Angus Cameron and Karen Mills
Conversation with Darwin artist Karen Mills quickly reveals an intelligent and vibrant personality. Reflective and self contained, Mills is playing an increasingly important role in the arts in the Northern Territory both as an administrative consultant and practicing artist.
Coming back to art later in life with a grown up family behind her, Mills brings a sense of maturity and awareness to her work. Combine this quiet confidence and self assurance with a sparkling enthusiasm and one senses an artist on the point of big things.
Born in Katherine in 1960 and adopted at an early age, Mills grew up in the lower southeast of South Australia and then Adelaide, a solitary only child of non-Aboriginal adoptive parents. Reading, music, drawing and painting were regular activities in a home where education and learning were important cultural values for a schoolteacher mother.
Mills first visited Darwin in 1983 to find and meet her Aboriginal birth mother. Her natural family are from the East Kimberley. While there is occasional contact with relations, the establishment of close family ties has been complicated after leading vastly separate and different lives.
Karen Mills has now spent the last 15 years living in Darwin permanently, bringing up children and working in various community organisations. The Mills surname is courtesy of husband Michael, whose family background is Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal.
Her art renaissance began in 1996 when she enrolled in an Associate Diploma of Fine Art at the Northern Territory University, later continuing in the Bachelor of Visual Art degree course.
In 1998 Mills spent six months away from home living in Alice Springs working as the trainee/guest curator of Straight from the Heart, a national travelling exhibition of Central Australian Aboriginal art, organised by Desart and the Araluen Centre.
In the same year a painting by Mills was hung in the 15th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. In 2001 Mills was selected in the influential Hatched, Healthway National Graduate Show at the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art. In 2002 she was included in the significant Five Darwin Painters exhibition at 24 HR Art, Northern Territory Centre for Contemporary Art.
In 2003 Mills was one of eight Indigenous artists from Australia selected to attend the Communion and Other Conversations residency at the prestigious Banff Centre, in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Thirty-four Indigenous artists from Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand and the United States gathered at the Centre to examine and explore the impact of Christianity and colonialism on contemporary Indigenous peoples and cultural practices.
The other Australian artists in Banff were Richard Bell, Jenny Fraser, Sandra Hill, Gordon Hookey, Janice Peacock and Christian Thompson, (Vernon Ah Kee was unable to attend).
The Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies is a unique arts learning place with a long history of dedication to the arts, leadership development and mountain culture. The Centre hosts artists from around the world in a complete range of artistic disciplines including music, theatre, writing and publishing, Aboriginal arts, media and visual arts and creative electronic environment.
The skills, networks and friendships developed in Banff have had a significant effect on Mills as an artist.
“It was my first major trip outside of Australia and the experience of travelling, meeting many other people, becoming friends, sharing our art and culture, seeing the sublime beauty of the mountains and living in an extreme cold climate with snow and ice completely opposite to Darwin’s tropical heat and humidity was exhilarating. Travelling to other places is good for finding out and understanding more about who I am, what is most important to me, my family that I have now and my loved ones. My art is informed by all my life experiences, feelings of connection and disconnection from both my Indigenous heritage and adoptive mother’s influences.”
By incorporating the loop pattern of both traditional dilly bag weaving and knitting stitches in her work Mills has taken a spiritual journey through the medium of paint.
The physical process of painting is important to the artist as she builds fluid, transparent, layers. The layers symbolise an internal and external cultural associations creating a sense of family and generational connection. As the artist explains:
“I become deeply interested and fascinated by the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ spaces that emerge and are revealed when textural layers are constructed over an underpainting of looping interwoven lines that play across the surface.”
The works are unplanned, the artist relying on the process of layering to express the notion of land and family, earth and blood. The process of underpainting develops ideas, feelings and relationships which nurture the creative process in subtle yet powerful forms.
In 2004 Mills plans include completing a body of work for a solo show and further developing her print making practice. Karen Mills has been an individual member of ANKAAA since 1996.
Karen Mills was assisted to attend the Banff Centre residency by the Australia Council, The Banff Centre, the Northern Territory Government through the Department of Community Development, Sport and Cultural Affairs and Don Whyte Framing
• Artist profile courtesy of The Arts Backbone, the Association of Northern, Kimberley and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists newsletter (Vol4, Issue 4).
• CAPTION: Karen Mills in her studio in Banff with Gordon Hookey. Image courtesy Stephen Gilchrist (c) 2004
• CAPTION: Red Yellow Violet No 13, Karen Mills, Acrylic on canvas, 2002. Image courtesy the artist (c) 2004.
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