In partnership with Mangkaja Arts Resource Centre, Disco Dreamtime Drums was a new exhibition by Walmajarri artist, John Prince Siddon, that featured a suite of Cement Fondu commissioned artworks, including a central drum installation, grid of 14 paintings, wallpaper and lightworks. Guest-curated by Siddon’s long term collaborator, Emilia Galatis, this was the artist’s first major solo exhibition in New South Wales.

The majority of the artworks presented in Disco Dreamtime Drums were created in 2023 during and in response to the disastrous flooding in the artist’s home of Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley region of far north Western Australia. The flooding resulted in the collapse of the town’s vital bridge along with the destruction of numerous homes, gravely affecting the artist, his community and wildlife in the area.

Reflecting on this time, the artist’s “darkest day”, this exhibition marked a discernible shift in the tenor of his practice, which can be observed between new works produced amidst these profoundly challenging circumstances and his previous, more bombastic approach that is evident in five earlier large-scale paintings that encompassed the space. Siddon’s new paintings – found both on canvases and tin drums – primarily utilise an earthier palette and propose an alternative, animistic hierarchy. While the artist’s celebrated signature wit remains evident in incisive cultural observations and a playful mix of the traditional and contemporary, his recent departure reflects a deliberate invocation of a more somber reality in which the impacts of natural disaster find his community in an ongoing state of recovery.

A cornerstone of the exhibition, the painted fuel drums offer historical reference to the art ‘ready-made’ and to Siddon’s personal creative origins whereby he would paint on any material he could find, including boab nuts, skulls, boards, satellite dishes, coolamons and foraged wood pieces. Siddon’s incorporation of disused objects and relics from the Kimberley region formally echoes his celebrated ‘mixed up’ aesthetic, which converges past and present by diffusing Narrangkani iconography across pop culture references and imagery of the natural world.

Siddon’s ‘past life’ participating in rodeos was also commemorated in this immersive installation of drums and mirror ball lighting, evoking the travelling rodeos and accompanying discos that played a key role in the social and cultural life of outback Australia when he was a young man. An ode to a wilder time and simultaneous nod to the dark side of colonial cattle stations that devastated Aboriginal communities, this work is indicative of the artist’s wry sense of humour and masterful capacity to collide and converge complexities and contradictions; mixing up the traditional and unconventional, personal and social, playful and political.