Joseph Au

Joseph (Josh) Au is one of the ‘parents’ of the Badu Art Centre and together with Laurie Nona, Dennis Nona and Alik Tipoti were amongst the small group who decided to lobby to create the Badu Art Centre in the early 2000’s.

Together with Laurie, Josh would work into the small hours of each morning, using a borrowed press and rollers to create prints on the balcony of Lauries house. They would then each take their work to Thursday Island and other places in the Torres Strait looking for places to display and sell their work.

Without Joseph and Laurie (and others) the Badu Art Centre maight not have been formed. Joseph lives for the Art Centre and his family. He has a beautiful attitude to life, is calm and considered and a master carver of wood shell and vinyl.

His relief prints are in a number of major gallery and private collections and always his imagery includes his own personal symbols – 3 characteristic marks which represent each of his children, the Totem of his mother and late father (Dugong and Crocodile) and Badu culture. His work is also considered to be important from a historical perspective and recently one of this works won the Joseph is in many ways ‘the rock’ that keeps the Art Centre life producing – and he provides his fellow artists with support and a generosity that makes him loved and respected by all.

A master draftsman, he seems to have an innate knowledge of all of the things in his world – Badu planst and animals, the ocean, creatures of the sea. The skies, winds and currents.

Joseph Au is a wonderful person and his work shows an understanding and a deep love of his Badu world. One of his most sensitive of carvings – a pregnant mother Dugong caught in a ghost net was selected to be the first Badu Carving to be produced into the Art Centre Bronze edition – to be posted on this web site immediately following the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (ends August 19) and is superb.

Owning a Joseph Au artwork is to have a piece of Island life that is historically and culturally in tact, creatively significant and beautifully expressed by a wonderful man and artist.