Time Square: Clifford Thompson’s four-dimensional metaphysics Max Delany

As Clifford Thompson Japaljarri sits in an industrial yard on the outskirts of Tennant Creek, on Warramungu Country, working on an ongoing series of paintings on canvas off-cuts and on diverse materials salvaged from the colonial waste and post-industrial detritus that litters the surrounding landscape; as he carefully, purposefully, and repeatedly applies viscous enamel paint in striated, mesmerising patterns onto the surface of strange-but-everyday found objects, one gets the sense that each painterly line is an insistence; each mark, an assertion; each careful, slow passage of the brush across the face of the support, a patient, persistent imperative.

Each of Clifford Thompson’s striated lines is a bearer of truth, authority, and vulnerability. They might be read as cultural markings, applied through a daily, dutiful process that is both ceremonial and prosaic. These lines might evoke bodily inscriptions, the shimmer of light across desert landscapes, the ripple of wind on water, the cultural weight of ceremonial design, or the intricate interweaving of kinship and Country.

I remember once asking Clifford the title of a newly finished painting — a geometric composition in black and white, characteristic of his concentric, nested rectangular motifs, which recede into deep space while also projecting into the future, beyond the frame and picture plane. Without hesitation, he nonchalantly replied, Time Square. And indeed, this simple formulation, which reappears in a series of related subsequent works, inevitably invokes philosophical and mystical reflections on time and space — and a metaphysical fourth dimension implied by the idea of time squared. At the same time, in his disarmingly insightful manner, Thompson’s cryptic, off-the-cuff title also gestures toward the dynamics of popular culture, the global imaginary, and the reverberating patterns of light, language, and song as they pulsate and echo through space.

The vulnerability referred to above relates both to the marginal conditions in which Clifford Thompson lives and makes his work, to the materiality of his practice, and to the cultural sovereignty of First Nations people on Country. The fragile hand, and the hesitant, sometimes wavering line, is not only an insistent form of cultural assertion — a reiteration of identity, presence, resilience, and authority — but also an analogue representation of the legacies of colonial disruption: a register of harms to culture and selfhood, of wounds to Country, and of the ongoing precarity of legal and cultural sovereignty.

The yard on the edge of town in which Clifford Thompson works is home to a group of men associated with the artists’ collective Tennant Creek Brio, established in 2019. Clifford is one of the original members, having previously participated in an earlier men’s art therapy program at the Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation’s Stronger Families Men’s Centre.

That program, initiated in 2016 by Rupert Betheras, Fabian Brown Japaljarri, and Joseph Williams Jungarayi, laid the groundwork for the collective’s formation — which has since gone on to achieve significant critical acclaim, including a major presentation at the Biennale of Sydney in 2020, a series of extended critical essays in Memo Review no. 2 (2024), and a landmark survey exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in the same year. Their works have now entered national and international collections, and wider public consciousness.

Tennant Creek Brio encompasses artists from multiple language groups living in and around the hard-hit, cross-cultural frontier town, roughly halfway between Alice Springs and Darwin.

Clifford Thompson is a Kaytetye man who grew up in Alekarenge / Ali Curung, with his mother’s Country at Karlu Karlu — a spiritually significant site also known as the Devil’s Marbles — and his father’s red kangaroo dreaming Country at Jarra Jarra, further west, over the Hanson River. It was the construction of the Telegraph Line through Warumungu Country in the 1870s that first precipitated frontier contact in these parts, followed soon after by the arrival of anthropologists. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gold rushes and iron ore mining led to the long-term and repeated displacement of the Warumungu and neighbouring groups from their ancestral homelands. In the 1920s, Tennant Creek also became a place of refuge for many Warlpiri and other clans fleeing the devastation of the Coniston Massacre — the last officially sanctioned massacre of Aboriginal people in Australia.

More recent waves of mining and agribusiness have intensified land and water degradation across the region. This layered history of dispossession, survival, and ecological distress forms a cultural and environmental backdrop against which Thompson’s practice — and the broader work of Tennant Creek Brio — might be understood.

A sense of environmental degradation is reflected in the material vulnerability of Clifford Thompson’s paintings and assemblages. Caring for Country and remediating ecological damage inform Thompson’s practice at both a material and ethical level. The milky waters of Lake Surprise — a site also connected to the Coniston Massacres — may inform the work’s subdued, ethereal, otherworldly palette. He is an avid collector of colonial and industrial waste, incorporating found and salvaged materials into his works to create renewed, dignified forms, notwithstanding their distressed, povera-like bearing. Equally, his use of enamel and industrial paints — the way oil leaks and stains the canvas, and the cultivation of chemical reactions between oil and mineral, micaceous paint — generates a volatile dynamism that evokes the entanglement of petrochemicals and Country, and the toxicity of sites such as the sludge pools at the abandoned Warrego Mine.

Clifford Thompson’s painterly practice is informed by the social context of kinship and brotherhood among the Brio members, with the industrial yard functioning as a communal space where art and social life intersect. The yard is equally a space for keeping culture strong, and in this sense, Thompson’s work is also guided by ancestral presence and his deep connection to Country. His methodology is slow, contemplative, and meditative — painting as both a healing process and a project of repair, of fixing up the mess.

Time is an important dimension of Thompson’s practice: the act of painting becomes a way of persisting through time, of being in time, of working within the continuum of ancestral and lived temporalities. By reclaiming and restoring the past — through the reawakening of cultural practices and memory — and projecting into the future — through the design of dynamic geometric forms in space, and the reiteration of selfhood, identity, and sovereignty — Thompson’s paintings and assemblages endow Country and culture with a quiet dignity and an unwavering assertion of cultural authority and belonging.

Max Delany is an independent curator, and was co-curator of Tennant Creek Brio: juparnta ngattu minjinypa iconocrisis, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2024