Language of the Earth
Japingka Gallery presents the first Western Australian
solo exhibition by Sarrita King as well as an exhibition from the Canning Stock Route

Gallery1: Sarrita King: Language of the Earth (Part 1)
At the young age of just 23, Sarrita King has been painting for five years, inspired by her late father and artistic mentor, William King Jungala. She is already recognised as a new star. Drawing on the philosophies her father taught her, Sarrita has integrated personal influences, cultural heritage and universal concepts into her striking contemporary paintings.

Sarrita King has structured her exhibition around the groupings of four different series of works: Ancestors, Language of the Earth, Lightning/ Fire, and Water.

Sarrita says, “This exhibition is a celebration of the Land - my personal connection with the Land, and everything the Land connects me with. The work is anchored by the Ancestor pieces, as they embody the past, the present and the future.”

Sarrita King grew up in Darwin, where her connections to Aboriginal culture and the land were nurtured, and where the experience of extreme weather and primal landscape provided the first artistic themes for her work. Sandhills, lightning, thunderstorms, torrential rain, fire and desert are among the great environmental factors that shaped the world of her family and forebears. By painting these elements, Sarrita has found a way to articulate her personal visual and emotional expression of the earth’s language.

Stylistically, Sarrita King uses traditional Aboriginal techniques and iconography, incorporating along with them unorthodox techniques inherited from her father, as well as personal techniques she has developed through her own practice. Sarrita King’s art is a fusion of the past and present along with a projection towards the future, representing the next generation of artists who have been influenced both by their indigenous history and their Western upbringing.

Sarrita has already exhibited widely, is represented in galleries in every Australian state, included in many high profile Australian and international art collections, and her work has been successful at auction in Paris at Art Curial.

Gallery2: Kimberley Artists: Language of the Earth (Part 2)
Just as Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route Exhibition is coming down at the Perth Convention Centre, Japingka is putting up another exhibition featuring works from the northern reaches of the Canning Stock Route in the Great Sandy Desert. Three exciting emerging painters - Wangkatjungka and Walmajarri elders, Rosie Uhl, Nada May and Rita Thomas - join established Wangkatjungka artist, Myapu Elsie Thomas, who was represented in Yiwarra Kuju. The three emerging artists range in age from their fifties to their late seventies, but the journey they make into the world of painting brings a vigour and freshness to the images of their ancestral country along the Canning Stock Route.

Rosie Uhl, who was born at Christmas Creek, paints the waterholes and river country that form the main hunting and gathering areas for desert people living in its vicinity. Rita Thomas also paints her Dreaming country at Christmas Creek as well as ancestral sites belonging to her mother’s and her father’s countries. She has forged a strongly individual style through her original way of making marks and setting up her compositions.

Nada May Rawlins, sister to artist Nada Rawlins, and already in her late 70s, only started painting in 2009. She chose to paint her mother’s country, Pimula Rockhole, to mark out her own subject matter as she sat among the established painters of her generation. Japingka Director and artist, David Wroth, who works closely with the Community, says: “Coming into the group at a relatively late stage gave Nada a point of difference. Although her loose handling of paint initially worried some of the more experienced painters, this very quality, with its free contemporary feel, shines out with its own eloquence.”




Both exhibitions open on Friday 25 November and run until 22 December, 2011
Sarrita King will be present at the opening and to give floor talks on the following Saturday and Sunday afternoons at 3.00pm.

Western Australian Indigenous Artists visit for their Exhibition opening and the Commonwealth Festival being hosted during CHOGM in Perth


Gallery1: In Japingka Gallery’s new exhibition: Spinifex Artists 2011 visitors will have an opportunity to see stunning new works from sixteen senior artists who live and work in the most far-flung corner of Western Australia.
This Western Australian Indigenous art community known as Spinifex Artists hails from the Victoria Desert region north west of the Nullabor Plain. The disrupted history of their country includes the upheavals of the Maralinga nuclear testing programme that took place during the 1950s and 1960s. During that era the desert people were moved from their lands and resettled in missions towards the west. But these Pitjantjatjara people had deep roots into their traditional lands and were determined to return to them.
That return came about in 2001 when the Spinifex People became one of the first Aboriginal groups in Western Australia to successfully gain Native Title rights to their lands. As part of the submission the artists painted intricate maps of their country to show cultural and social kinship ties to the great sites of the desert. These paintings were later bequeathed to the State as a collection held in the Western Australian Museum.
In 1997 the Spinifex people established themselves at the tiny community of Tjuntjuntjara, just 200 kms from the Western Australia-South Australia border. The Spinifex Art Project that began as a cultural and legal response to the land claim subsequently took on the role of cultural maintenance for the Spinifex community with members continuing a close management and stewardship program of 55,000 square kms of their land. New bush roads have been created into otherwise inaccessible country, and regular maintenance trips led by custodians are made into outlying locations.
Long-serving arts coordinators, Louise and Peter Twigg, say that -“the artists’ paintings are often produced when they are visiting their ancestral country. Their intricately composed canvases detail the journeys and deeds of Ancestors who created the sites in their Spinifex homelands. Documenting these sites, their relationships and stories, provides the artists with a way to record, promote and pass on elements of culture that are crucial to sustaining the long-term future and health of their people.”
Many of these artists currently have works in the extensive exhibition Living Water: Contemporary Art of the Far Western Desert at the at National Gallery of Victoria’s Ian Potter Centre in Federation Square. Japingka’s Spinifex Artists 2011 provides an opportunity for those who won’t



be able to get to Melbourne to view paintings by some of these artists. Like many of the original Western Desert artists, some are reaching a substantial age while others have recently passed on. With their passing we lose some of the truest expressions of traditional indigenous knowledge. This exhibition provides an invaluable opportunity to view and collect some of these irreplaceable artworks.
Paintings include combined works by the men’s and women’s groups that show the interconnected custodial ties of the traditional owners.
In Gallery2, Japingka is showing Mowanjum Artists – Paintings and Prints. Mowanjum Artists comprise the Worrorra, Wunumbul and Ngarinyin people of the north-west Kimberley who are traditional owners and custodians of the Wandjina sites from this magnificent region. The paintings and prints in the exhibition represent the strong and continuing tradition of cultural practice that links these people with their land through the Creation stories, originally expressed in the great painted rock art ‘gallery’ sites of the Kimberley. This exhibition is presented in association with Mowanjum Art and Culture Centre.
Spinifex Artists 2011 and Mowanjum Artists – Paintings and Prints will open on a Sunday 23 October at 3 pm and run until 16 November at Japingka Gallery in Fremantle. Artists from both communities will attend the opening.

Spinifex Artists 2011 - Gallery1 Opens October 23, 2011
Spinifex Artists present their most recent paintings, in a process that continues the journey of countrymen revisiting and reconnecting with traditional Pitjantjatjara lands. The paintings detail the pathways and the actions of Ancestors who created, travelled across and are contained within Spinifex lands. By documenting these sites, the relationships and stories provide the artists with a method to record and pass on elements of culture that are crucial to sustaining the long-term future and health of the Spinifex People. This exhibition is presented in association with Spinifex Arts Project.

Closes November 16, 2011

T

he exhibitions will open on a Sunday afternoon, to allow visiting artists to participate in Indigenous events related to the CHOGM programme organised throughout the following week.


From minimalist works in black and white to intensely colourful canvases, Japingka’s two new exhibitions illustrate the rich diversity of contemporary Indigenous art
Gallery1: In Black and White
Aboriginal art, when pared back to its most basic concepts, can be a revelation in design and structure. So it is with the current exhibition In Black and White at Japingka Gallery. The paintings, mostly from the western desert, vary from the most intricate patterns of desert sandhills or woven fish nets, through to schematic depictions of soakages and rockholes, and bold linear designs showing ‘spear-making’ trees and Tingari motifs.
Twenty seven indigenous artists have contributed to this exhibition, including many of the best known artists of their regions. All of these artists have eschewed the use of strong colour, which largely defines the look of western desert art, and in its place used a minimalist palette of black and white, occasionally adding one extra earth colour for contrast. The iconography of creation stories and topographical maps are particularly eloquent in the drama of these largely two-toned canvases.
Many of the artists have built their reputations on their signature use of black and white through which they aim to create an energetic field that conjures up the traditional world of their desert homelands. Dorothy Napangardi is a well-known example. Painting the crusted structures of the salt lake at the women’s ceremonial grounds at Mina Mina, she recreates the power and importance of this ancestral site. Other famous women artists who work in this way include Lilly Kelly Napangardi, Ngoia Pollard Naplatjarri and Anna Price Petyarre, whose drifting images of sandhills, dry river-beds and rockholes capture the moving profile of the desert landscape.

The late Mijili Gibson, who starred as the grandmother in the movie Samson and Delilah, has re-created her birthplace near Lake MacKay in a stark linear painting. The black and white structure of her work has a strong Indigenous cultural reference, and points to the identity and cultural issues that feature at the heart of the film. This may suggest that there is no clearer way to make a cultural statement than to mark it out starkly in black and white. Further merging the lines between art and life, the actor who played the lead role of Delilah is Mijili’s granddaughter in real life.
This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view a collection of the finest works by some of Australia’s top and most highly regarded Indigenous artists.

In Gallery2, off-setting the restrained palette of the artworks in Gallery1, are the intensely colourful paintings of Donald Moko, Margaret Baragurra and Mervyn Numbagardi, three of the most senior artists from the Bidyadanga Community Art Centre south of Broome in Western Australia.
Although referring back to the desert countries of their ancestors and of their own youths when they lived a nomadic life-style revolving around key waterholes on clan estates, the abstract design qualities of these artists’ works finds strong resonance with contemporary non-Indigenous art. With a fusion style that melds the desert imagery of their forebears with the sub-tropical coastal colours of their adopted home, these artists have established a highly distinctive identity.
Now, through its art centre, the coastal community is focused on transferring the knowledge and culture of its elders through artistic inter-generational interaction. By painting their traditional country and its associated culture, the younger artists have started a push to understand and represent the culture of their elders. Led by their senior artists, with their intimate knowledge of the desert landscape, Bidyadanga painters incorporate the rich colours of their adopted saltwater country into their idiosyncratic desert style of painting.
This exhibition is presented in association with Bidyadanga Art Centre.
Opens August 26, 2011 - closes October 12, 2011

Japingka’s two new exhibitions take us
from Heaven to Earth, from the distant
constellations of the southern skies
to here-and-now life at the centre of
Australia in Alice Springs’ town camps
Gallery 1: Alma Nungarrayi Granites - The Night Sky
Director of Japingka Gallery in Fremantle, David Wroth, was attracted to Alma Granites’ extraordinary paintings three years ago when he was putting together
a group exhibition from Warlukurlangu Artists at Yuendumu. He states: “Alma Granite’s new canvases, like many of the works from Yuendumu, are beautifully
executed compositions. What distinguishes them is their dramatic story depicting the creation of constellations in the night sky.” His evaluation is backed by
the public. Alma Granites’ star paintings have enjoyed galactic success and are much sought after by both national and international art collectors.
Alma Nungarrayi Granites is one of the few Indigenous artists to focus her artistic expression on the heavens. Her dazzlingly detailed paintings of the night sky,
in particular the constellation western astrologers know as the Pleiades, tell the story of the seven Napaljarri sisters who turned into fire and ascended high
into the ether. This was their inventive way of escaping a Japaljarri man, who, inflamed by love, relentlessly pursued them. He, too, took to the skies and, in the
form of Jukurra-jukurra, the morning star, is still seen following, but still not catching, the ever-elusive sisters.
This ancient story is part of Yanjirlpirri Jukurrpa (Star Dreaming) that belongs to Japaljarri and Jungarrayi men and Napaljarri and Nungarrayi women. In
Yanjirlpirri Jukurrpa the ceremony tells of the journey of Japaljarri and Jungarrayi men who travelled from Kurlurngalinypa, near Lajamanu, to Yanjirlypirri,
west of Yuendumu, and then on to Lake Mackay on the West Australian border. Along the way they performed Kurdiji (initiation ceremonies) for young men.
Napaljarri and Nungarrayi women also danced for these Kurdiji. Yanjirlypiri remains an extremely important ceremonial site where young boys are brought to
be initiated from as far as Pitjantjatjara country, to the south, and Lajamanu, to the north. On one level, Alma’s paintings depict this site where there is a low hill
and a water soakage.
Alma Nungarrayi Granites, a Warlpiri woman born in 1955, is a senior member of the Yuendumu, a large community located 300 km north-west of Alice
Springs. Alma has been painting for Warlukurlangu Artists since 1987. Gloria Morales, Assistant Manager of Warlukurlangu, relates: “Since 2007 Alma has
dedicated all her efforts to making her art an important part of her life. She has explored different painting techniques to express her Jukurrpa and to give a
modern spin to an ancient story. Her paintings are dynamic and constantly evolving as she progresses in her evocation of the night sky.”
Other well-known artists from Yuendumu will be showing alongside Alma Granites, including her mother Bessie Nakamarra Sims and Mickey Jampijinpa
Singleton. This exhibition is proudly presented in association with Warlukurlangu Artists.
Cecilia Alfonso, long-time Manager of Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation, is available for media interviews on 8956 4133 or info@warlu.com
Gallery 2: Our Homes: Town Camp & Beyond - Tangentyere Artists
While many of the desert art communities paint ancient stories and traditional Dreamings, the artworks from Tangentyere Artists are fully focused on the here
and now. Using strong colours and stark designs the artists express their experiences, their dreams, hopes, values and memories, providing an important visual
record of a time of transition.
These works, which are painted both on canvas and on a variety of found objects, are from artists of the Alice Springs Town Camps. The Tangentyere Art
Centre provides artistic support and marketing to over 380 artists from 19 Alice Springs Town Camps. These camps are home to around 2,000 Indigenous
people from the local area as well as to many visitors from the remote communities of Central Australia. The Town Camp artists represent 20 different central
Australian languages, and the stories they present in their paintings reflect the wide diversity of their experience.
This exhibition is presented in association with Tangentyere Artists.
The exhibitions open Friday 8th July 2011 at 6.30pm and will remain open daily until Wednesday 17th August 2011.
For further information, please contact Ian Plunkett (Gallery Director)
on (08) 9335 8265 or via email on japingka@iinet.net.au.
Gallery Hours: Mon - Fri: 10.00am - 5.30pm, Sat & Sun: 12.00pm - 5.00pm. FREE ENTRYWhist there may be some division within the Yindjibarndi People of the Fortescue River region of the Pilbara over the future of the mining negotiations with regard to their traditional lands, they are completely united in their love for and ancient ties to their land and this love and knowledge is reflected in their remarkable paintings which document their beautiful land. Japingka Gallery is very proud to announce two important new Exhibitions of remarkable paintings from two very different regions of Australia. In association with two Indigenous owned and run Art Centres (Yinjaa-Barni Artists and Julalikari Artists), Japingka Gallery is mounting these exhibitions which depict not only daily life in these very different parts of the country, but also the ancient “Dreaming” and Creation stories associated with the land. Famous Yinjaa-Barni Artists, Clifton Mack and Marlene Harold will be attending the opening.

Both Exhibitions offer the chance to view and experience these very different ways of life varying from the Central Desert region around Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory to the sweeping river plains and mountains of the Pilbara region of WA. with the added attraction of meeting the Artists. One of Japingka Gallery’s most popular annual exhibitions comes from the Yinjaa-Barni Artists based in Roebourne. In this year’s exhibition well-known artists such as Clifton Mack, Maudie Jerrold, Allery and Aileen Sandy, Marlene Harold, Barngi Pansy Sambo and Wendy Darby demonstrate an even stronger individuality of style, sophistication of palette and sense of design as they continue to refine their art in the images of their country.
Only in recent years have Indigenous artists from the Pilbara been exhibiting their interpretations of their Fortescue homelands. Their paintings are exciting and inventive and this year established artists are joined by newcomers, the next generation, whose work is promisingly good.
In the midst of the harsh, Spinifex-clad Pilbara landscape are moments of pure creation – hidden gorges with cool water, seeds and flowers bursting out after rain. These moments belong to the great Creation Stories of the Marrga, which refer to the Thalu, or Increase Sites, where the spirits of all the elements of the living world are re-invigorated. These are the subjects for these artists, nearly all Yindjibarndi people, whose ancestral homelands are around the Millstream tablelands. Japingka presents this exhibition in association with Yinjaa-Barni Art Centre.
GALLERY2: JULALIKARI ARTISTS
In Japingka’s Gallery2 four Tennant Creek artists, Peggy Jones, Flora Holt, Lindy Brody and Susan Nelson, make whimsical observations of their world in and around Tennant Creek. They paint lively and loving images of country - bush medicine and bush tucker, birds and animals, soakages and ceremonies. They paint images of biblical stories drawn from the mission church, and images of modernity – family events with Toyotas and station wagons, road trains and the railway line.

The artists are represented by Julalikari Arts Centre, 500kms north of Alice Springs on the Stuart Highway. Julalikari Arts Centre operates as a regional hub for the Barkly region, a huge expanse of nearly 300,000 square km between the tropical Top End and the arid Red Centre in the Northern Territory. It is located in an iconic building referred to as ‘the Pink Palace’ built by Mary Ward of Banka Banka Station as a hostel for stockmen and their families coming into town from out bush. In 1995 it was converted into the Art and Craft Centre for local Aboriginal Women. It is now creative home to about 18 artists who represent, both in artwork and language groups, an enormous spread of traditional country in the Barkly Region and beyond. Their age and experience is of a similarly broad range.

The exhibitions open Friday 20th May 2011 at 6.30pm and will remain open daily until Friday 29th June 2011. Yinjaa-Barni artists, MARLENE HAROLD and CLIFTON MACK, will be present at the opening.
For further information, please contact Ian Plunkett (Gallery Director)
on (08) 9335 8265 or via email on japingka@iinet.net.au.
Gallery Hours: Mon - Fri: 10.00am - 5.30pm, Sat & Sun: 12.00pm - 5.00pm. FREE ENTRY.
Exhibitions can be viewed online at: www.japingka.com.au.


Last Nomads Paint their Dreaming Stories
Tjapaltjarri Brothers


Opens April 8, 2011 - Closes May 11, 2011

In only 1984, a family group of nine people effectively walked out of the “Dreamtime” and into what was then the 20th Century. From living a traditional nomadic life in some of Australia’s most remote and harshest country (near Lake Mackay and Kintore on the West Australian/Northern Territory border), this small family group walked their way into a completely alien environment and world. Whilst this last group of nomads had not seen or heard of 20th century wonders such as cars, electricity. television and tapped water, their links back to their Culture and their Dreaming Stories remained pristine and strong and enabled them to cope with the very different world that confronted them. This unbroken link back to the Dreamtime is reflected in the integrity, power and timelessness of their stunning paintings featured in this important Exhibition of new artworks which tell their stories associated with the ancient Creation myths of the “Tingari Cycle” which are unique to this remote desert region.

Japingka Gallery is also pleased to announce that on the same night we will be hosting two Artists from Aurukun, based near the tip of the Cape York Peninsula who will be attending the official opening of an Exhibition of beautiful paintings from the Wik and Kugu Art Centre. These wonderful, fresh and uplifting paintings depict daily life in this far away Community based in Far North Queensland. This is an excellent and rare opportunity to meet and talk to these Artists about their work and the life that they lead in the tropical north.


The three Tjapaltjarri brothers showing at Japingka’s Gallery 1 in April have an extraordinary story to tell. Walking out of the desert only 27 years ago, and having had no prior contact with Europeans, they stepped straight into the roar of the twentieth century.
Walimpirrnga, Walala and Tamlik Tjapaltjarri were part of a family group of nine Pintupi people who only emerged from their desert homelands and nomadic life in the Gibson Desert in 1984.
They are believed to be amongst the last desert nomads to have been living in this traditional way. They roamed between waterholes around Lake Mackay, along the border country between Western Australia and the Northern Territory. They dressed in hairstring belts and hunted with spears and boomerangs. Their diet mainly consisted of goanna, rabbit and bushfoods harvested from native plants, and they lived their links back to the Dreamtime in a completely unmitigated way. And it is these ancient Pintupi Dreaming stories that the three bothers now paint, transferring onto canvas what they previously expressed by drawing in the sand and by painting their bodies for ceremonies.
Their exodus from their homelands occurred after word had reached the remote Aboriginal community of Kiwirrkurra in Western Australia that a group of people had been sighted in the desert. The community quickly realised that these might be relatives who had been left behind twenty years earlier.
There were four brothers in the group (Walimpirrnga, Walala, Tamlik, and Yari Yari), three sisters (Yardi, Yikultji and Tjakaraia) and two mothers (Nanyanu and Papalanyanu). The boys and girls were all in their early-to-late teens, although their exact ages were not known. The mothers were in their late 30s.
The father, and husband of the two wives, had died, possibly from eating spoiled canned foods found at an old mining exploration camp. After his death, the group travelled south to where they thought their relatives might be, as they had seen 'smokes' in that direction. They encountered a man from Kiwirrkura but due to a misunderstanding they fled back north while he returned to the community and alerted the members who then set out to find them.
The community members travelled by vehicle to where the group had last been seen, and then tracked them for some time, before finally locating them. The Pintupi-speaking trackers told them there was plenty of food at Kiwirrkurra, and water that came out of pipes. Yardi relates that this concept astounded them. After making contact and establishing their relationships, the Pintupi nine were invited to live at Kiwirrkurra, where most of them still reside and where they met with other members of their extended family
Medical examination revealed that the Tjapaltjarri clan (as they are also known) were "in beautiful condition. Not an ounce of fat, well proportioned, strong, fit, healthy". At Kiwirrkurra, near Kintore,.
In 1986, Yari Yari went back to the desert. Walimpirrnga, Walala, and Tamlik (now known as Thomas) have gained international recognition in the art world as the Tjapaltjarri Brothers for their striking renditions of their ancestral stories. One of the mothers has died; the other has settled with three sisters in Kiwirrkurra.
This exhibition is the work of the three Tjapaltjarri brothers, whose destiny took them from their teenage introduction to the outside world to being part of the great resurgence of Indigenous desert art. This is the story of Walimpirrnga, Walala, and Thomas Tjapaltjarri.


With her beautifully worked paintings of infinite detail and layered colour, indigenous artist Helen McCarthy Tyalmuty captures the pulse of a world we rarely see.
Helen grew up on the Northern Territory coast near the mouth of the Daly River where she learned the lessons of the natural world and the traditions of the Wadjigan people. It was her grandfather’s stories and knowledge about the aquatic environment and marine life found in the Timor Sea and Daly River that largely fired her imagination and initiated her creative output.
Ultimately her grandfather, a traditional carver of wooden canoes, confronted the question as to whether the family could maintain its coastal existence or whether it would be better to move to a larger settlement to seek education for the children. He decided on the latter option, carved his last canoe and the family moved.
Helen went on to honour the educational aspirations of her grandfather. She graduated through university and became a teacher. In her 30s, and still maintaining her strong connection to her family heritage, Helen began painting. She found ways to draw on her ancestral traditions to create powerful images of the coastal practises of the Wadjigan people. These images include Wannga ceremonies of initiation; Kapuk ceremonies for the afterlife; land management processes like burning off the country before the onset of the wet season, and traditional weaving practices for making fish nets and baskets.
Weaving fish nets is deeply rooted in the life of Helen’s community at Balgal. Using fibres from the local Pandanus palms, the women constantly make and patch nets. Helen says that in her paintings, apart from depicting the literal process, she “also explores this weaving and patching process as a metaphor for making and mending relationships, for keeping the threads of family and community strong.”
Helen’s first major recognition came in 2007 in Darwin when she won the People’s Choice Award in the NAATSIA Telstra Awards. Helen McCarthy Tyalmuty has continued to explore different subjects and approaches as she builds her reputation as one of Australia’s most outstanding younger indigenous artists. Intricately painted and powerful artworks depicting the stories of her people will be showing in Gallery1.
Gallery2 at Japingka will feature iconographical minimal works by Freddie Timms Ngarrmaliny, a leading figure amongst the ochre painters from the East Kimberley. Freddie Timms acquired his knowledge and techniques working alongside the best of the Warmun artists including his father-in-law Paddy Jampinji, as well as Rover Thomas, Jack Britten, Hector Jandanay and Henry Wambini. Timms’ dramatic ochre paintings re-create this Kimberley country by identifying In Gallery1 Japingka features the fine work of Warlpiri artist Alma Nungarrayi Granites in her magnificent series of Star Dreaming paintings. While most Aboriginal art looks down onto the land from an aerial perspective, Granites is one of the few Indigenous artists to look up into space, through the clarity of the desert air, and paint the constellations.
Yanjirlpirri Jukurrpa (Star Dreaming) relates the story of the seven ancestral Napaljarri sisters who are found today in the cluster of the seven stars of the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus. The Pleiades, seven women of the Napaljarri skin group, are often depicted in paintings of this Jukurrpa carrying the Jampijinpa man, Wardilyka, who is in love with them, and who is embodied in the Orion's Belt cluster of stars.
Jukurra-jukurra, the Morning Star, a Jakamarra man who is also in love with the seven Napaljarri sisters, is often shown chasing them across the night sky. In a final attempt to escape from him, the Napaljarri sisters turned themselves into fire and ascended into the heavens to become stars.
Alma Granites’ work offers a rare opportunity to see Aboriginal representations of the night sky and to gain an insight into Aboriginal astronomy.
Alongside these paintings, fellow Nyirripi and Yuendumu artists from the Tanami Desert present striking new works that chart other major Jukurrpa, or Dreaming Stories, from their homelands. Ormay Nangala Gallagher depicts Yankirri, Emu Dreaming. In her intricately detailed and richly colourful paintings, Ormay paints the tracks of the emu as it feeds on bush raisins around the rockhole at Ngarlikurlangu. Margaret Napangardi Brown and Pauline Napangandi Gallagher paint Mina Mina Jukurrpa, Women’s Ceremonial Dreaming, while Mary Anne Michaels depicts Lappi Lappi Dreaming, one of the stories of the Rainbow Serpent.
Mickey Jampijinpa Singleton, Jorna Napurrurla Nelson and other talented artists from this region are also exhibiting. The exhibition is presented in association with Warlukurlangu Artists.
Gallery2- Lisa Michl

In Gallery2, paintings and limited edition prints by north Queensland artist Lisa Michl Ko-manggén are on show. The artist’s family connections run through her mother and grandmother’s side to the Kokoberrin language group on the central west coast of Cape York Peninsula, and Lisa’s bold designs in earth tones of red, yellow, black, white and blue are inspired by traditional Kokoberrin stories. These large, contemporary canvases have met with resounding success. This is the artist’s second exhibition at Japingka Gallery.
Paintings from the Great Sandy and Central Deserts

Striking ancient desert topography – streaming sandhills, shallow swamps and life-saving waterholes – are the predominant subjects of Japingka’s two new exhibitions.

In Gallery1, in association with Watiyawanu Artists of Amunturrngu, Japingka Gallery presents the distinctive, finely painted graphic works from the Mt Liebig community. Located at the base of Amunturrungu, the original local name for Mt Liebig, this community has become home to renowned artists in a very short time.

Despite its proximity to Papunya Tula, one of the earliest desert art communities, Mt Liebig started to engage in the painting movement only in the early 1990s. It didn’t take long, however, for its talented artists to gain prominence. It was the success in the late ‘90s of Lilly Kelly Napangardi’s elegant and finely detailed sandhills paintings that placed the Watiyawanu artists firmly on the art connoisseurs’ radar.

Since 2000, Wentja Napaltjarri (Shorty Lungkata’s daughter), Lilly Kelly Napangardi and Ngoia Pollard Naplatjarri (winner of the Telstra Art Award in 2006) have been increasingly seen in prestigious art prizes and exhibitions around the nation and beyond. 2004 marked the year that they were joined by senior Pitjantjatjara medicine man, Tjapaltjarri Whiskey. Tjapaltjarri Whiskey spent the final four years of his life painting full-time, all day every day. Producing spectacularly original work from the start, he gained rapid recognition as one of Australia’s top and most collectable contemporary artists. He passed away in late 2008, but his singular paintings of the Rockholes near the Olgas live on to tell his dreaming story.

Japingka is proud to show works by all of the above Watiyawanu artists and others, including Fabrianne Peterson Nampitjinpa, Lynette Corby Nungurrayi, Maisie Campbell Naplatjarri and Maureen Morgan Naplatjarri.

In Gallery 2, Biddee Baadjo is holding her first solo exhibition, showing recent works painted at Wangkatjungka Community during 2009. Her paintings are luminous and evocative, recreating the sandhill country of the artist's ancestral country adjacent to the Canning Stock Route in Western Australia's Great Sandy Desert. Biddee Baadjo began painting in 1994, developing a strong stylistic approach that is distinctive amongst painters from her community. She loads her brush with paint and pushes it loosely over the canvas, creating soft, lush lines of colour. Biddee is increasingly recognised by art lovers and collectors and Japingka is thrilled to honour her with her first solo exhibition.

Exhibitions open on Friday 16 October at 6.30pm and continue until 18 November.


Japingka’s spring exhibition shifts from the sublime to the light-hearted, from the illuminated canvases of senior Anmatyerre artist, Kudditji Kngwarreye, to Ruth Robertson’s playful depictions of ‘cheeky dogs’ around the Alice Springs town camps.
In Gallery1 Japingka Gallery is showing Anwernekenhe Ayeye – The Story Belonging to Us. This lively, colourful and frequently humorous exhibition tells the stories of some of the artists living in the Town Camps in Alice Springs. They include dogs on trucks or running amok in front yards, desert landscapes and paintings of patchwork blankets that the artists, in their youth, were obliged to make on the missions.
The painters are members of Tangentyere Artists which was established in 2005 and is an Aboriginal owned and directed Art Centre situated in Alice Springs and managed by Tangentyere Council.
Liesl Rockchild, Art Coordinator of Tangentyere Artists, says: “We provide art support to over 400 artists from nineteen Alice Springs Town Camps. These camps are home to around 2000 Indigenous people from both the local area as well as many visitors from remote communities across Central Australia. The Town Camp artists represent twenty different central Australian languages, clearly a more complex situation than a remote community of one language group. The Town Campers are among the most highly disadvantaged people in Australia, living in the most challenging physical and social conditions. But in the face of disadvantage, these artists demonstrate resilience and passion for life, and reflect, in their paintings, the diversity of culture and daily camp life.”
In Gallery2 are recent works from Kudditji Kngwarreye. These colour-field paintings by 80 year old senior Anmatyerre artist capture a vision of his beloved desert homelands that is instantly modern yet strongly connected to Central Desert traditions. Some canvases are subtle and serene while others are intense and energetic, as the artist depicts his desert country in all the differing lights of day and seasons of the year. Kudditji extends the late works of his older sister, renowned artist Emily Kngwarreye, in a complementary way, creating suites of colour and mood that reflect the power of his custodial country at Alhalkere.
The exhibitions open on Saturday 12 September 2009 at 2.30pm and remain open daily until 7th October 2009
Print quality images are available from here for print media purposes.
For further information, please contact Ian Plunkett (Gallery Director)
on (08) 9335 8265 or via email on japingka@iinet.net.au.
Gallery Hours: Mon - Fri: 10.00am - 5.30pm, Sat & Sun: 12.00pm - 5.00pm. FREE ENTRY.
Exhibitions can be viewed online at: www.japingka.com.au.


Special Event and Exhibition opening
In a break with many years of tradition (and after what has become an institution with art lovers and collectors) of Friday night Exhibition openings, Japingka Gallery is mounting its next major Exhibition of artworks from the extremely remote Spinifex Community on a Saturday afternoon. This reflects the remarkable achievement of the women Artists of Spinifex who will be attending (as finalists) the prestigious WA Indigenous Art Awards at AGWA on the Friday night prior.
The unusual Saturday afternoon opening affords the women the opportunity to attend the official opening of the brand new Spinifex Arts Project Exhibition opening along with several of the men Artists who will also be undertaking the long trip down to Fremantle for the Japingka Gallery opening. This will be a unique opportunity to meet a large group Spinifex Arts Project Artists. Those Artists who will be attending the opening include, Estelle Hogan, Carlene West, Tjaduwa Woods, Simon Hogan, Fred Grant and Byron Brookes.
In conjunction with Spinifex Arts Project, Japingka Gallery is pleased to present exciting new works from the artists of Tjuntjuntjara community. This is one of Western Australia's most remote townships. Located in the Great Victorian Desert, it is accessed via 660 kilometres of dirt roads to the east of Kalgoorlie.
The community has traditional links to lands affected by the Maralinga atomic testing programme. In recent decades the people, displaced in the 1950s, have settled back on their country. Using painting as part of their documentation, they were granted Native Title rights in 2001 for an area of 55,000 square kilometres. The community closely manages the country under its stewardship, with regular maintenance trips into outlying locations, led by custodians and elders. The paintings, with their great compositional strength and colour, reflect the custodial and kinship ties that bind the people to their lands.
Last year the Spinifex men were selected as finalists in the inaugural WA Indigenous Art Awards hosted by the Art Gallery of Western Australia. This is the biggest and most prestigious Indigenous art prize in Australia. This year, the women have been selected as finalists.
Both men and women artists will be present at Japingka’s opening, giving guests a chance to speak to them about their paintings.
The opening, to accommodate the artists’ presence, will be held on Saturday 25 July at 2.30pm. The exhibition closes on 26 August 2009.
The exhibition opens on Saturday 25th July 2009 at 2.30pm and remains open daily until 24th June 2009
For further information, please contact Ian Plunkett (Gallery Director) on (08) 9335 8265 or via email on japingka@iinet.net.au.

Gallery Hours: Mon - Fri: 10.00am - 5.30pm, Sat & Sun: 12.00pm - 5.00pm. FREE ENTRY.
Exhibitions can be viewed online at: www.japingka.com.au.
Japingka’s autumn exhibitions are both iconically Western Australian. ‘Old-timers’ from the remote Wangkatjungka community in the far north Kimberley are showing alongside more recently established yet highly accomplished artists from the coastal Pilbara region.
In Gallery1, the Wangkatjungka artists’ exhibition Desert Rains is exuberant with lush, fresh colours. In October 2008, as the artists settled down to paint for their exhibition, early seasonal rain began to fall. David Wroth, Japingka’s director reported, “Everyone’s minds began to wander to their ancestral country as they took up their brushes. In conversation, they wondered if the rain was reaching deep into their country, if it was filling the waterholes. They wondered if their country was healthy or ailing.”
Most of the Wangkatjungka artists have been living away from their country for nearly sixty years. As exiles from the Great Sandy Desert, the old people revisit their homelands in their thoughts and in their paintings. This exhibition sings with colours of hope. Inspired by the rains, a sense of rejuvenation and exuberance has emerged from the intense interaction between memory and canvas resulting in vividly coloured collaborative and individual works.
In Gallery2, artists from Yinjaa-Barni Art in Roebourne in Western Australia’s Pilbara district speak a different pictorial language to represent their country. Allery Sandy and Wendy Darby paint the land from an aerial perspective, their works giving the sensation of flying over the landscape and seeing the meandering watercourses etched into the red earth. Clifton Mack has a highly individual visual vocabulary to represent his intimate view of country, while Pansy Sambo has a more European painterly approach in her representations of the bush and flowers of the area.
The Yinjaa-Barni artists group have been painting and exhibiting together for several years now and Clifton Mack, Allery Sanders, Maudie Jerrold and Wendy Darby have, between them, taken out many prizes from the annual Cossack Art Awards. Patricia Floyd, Yinjaa-Barni Art Centre Coordinator, says: “Painting has engendered a great sense of self-worth and pride within the community. The older members paint what is close to their hearts - their country, their culture, plants of the region. They are now teaching the younger members through painting and story-telling, particularly about the plants and their traditional uses.”

The exhibitions open on Friday 15 May at 6.30pm and continue until 24 June 2009.


Gallery 1: NYIRRIPI AND YUENDUMU ARTISTS
Gallery 2: INDIGENOUS GLASSWORKS - THE BLUE OCHRE PROJECT
Paul Sanders, director of Glassmob Studio near Aubury, says of the Blue Ochre Project: “This is a world first, for Indigenous artists to work directly with hot glass in such an immediate process. The tools are basic and the process very hands-on. We only add the furnace and kiln technology. It is like pouring out honey and watching the artist craft a coolamon or shield as though using a butter knife.”
In this her premier exhibition, Indigenous artist Rachel Malthouse has created innovative glassworks by working hot glass as it is poured in a molten flow from the furnaces. The process itself is thousands of years old, dating back to Mesopotamia and Egypt, but the Blue Ochre Project is unique in using high quality Australian crystal glass. This is heated in the furnace to 1200 degrees C and then poured onto a steel surface where the artist has a timeframe of only 5 – 10 minutes to respond to the poured glass and create the artwork. It is an immediate and spontaneous process. If the interaction between artist and material doesn’t gel in that time, the piece has to be scrapped.
While the creative time is nerve-wrackingly short, the follow up time is long. It takes 4 to 5 days for the glass to be cooled and finished, a process that de-stresses and stabilises the sculpted pieces. Crystal glass has distinctive sheen and refractive qualities, and in this exhibition the artists use clear as well as obsidian black and gold hues.
The forms Rachel Malthouse creates are her interpretation of traditional artefacts from her homeland near Mareeba on the Atherton Tablelands in far north Queensland. The designs are taken from clan motifs that were applied to personal artefacts and shields, which were considered to have protective qualities for their owners. These traditional forms have been passed down to the artist through her mother’s family. Rachel’s mother is the Queensland artist Jennifer Herd.
Working alongside Rachel is Gay Baker who exemplifies the diversity of the glass-making process with her richly coloured forms displaying complex patterns representing bushtucker and seed motifs.
Also showing at Japingka in Gallery 1 are new works from the remote Tanami Desert communities of Nyirripi and Yuendumu. The exhibition is presented in association with Warlangkurlangu Artists.
Gloria Morales of Warlangkurlagu Artists, says: “The artists from Nyirripi are proud to show their work and to get recognition for it - it is important for them. There are three and sometimes four generations working together, so it’s a regenerative process for maintaining knowledge. The artists want an art centre of their own, as art becomes an increasingly important part of their community.”
Nyirripi is a small community, 160 Km west from the Tanami Road at the Yuendumu turnoff. Fieldworkers at Warlukurlangu Art centre at Yuendumu make weekly trips out to the community to collect new paintings, provide the next round of materials as well as give professional advice to the artists.
Rachel Malthouse will attend the opening of her premier exhibition at Japingka Gallery at 6.30pm on Friday 20th February. The exhibitions close on 31st March.

Preview both Exhibitions at www.japingka.com.au

KUDDITJI KNGWARREYE Exhibition 68 4 April – 1 May 2008

At a time when Aboriginal art is being closely monitored in its role crossing between two cultures, Japingka Gallery is exhibiting the work of Kudditji Kngwarreye, an artist that bridges cultural boundaries with his contemporary interpretation of ancestral stories. Capturing the changing moods and seasons of his desert country with sometimes bright, sometimes subtle blocks of colour, his paintings sing in a way that is reminiscent of both Rothko and later works of his elder sister, Emily Kngwarreye.

Kudditji Kngwarreye is a senior man of the Eastern Anmatyerre language group from Alhalkere on the Utopia homelands, about 270 kms north east of Alice Springs. Kudditji (pronounced Kubbitji), was born around 1928. He is the younger brother of renowned Utopia artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

As a young man Kudditji worked as a stockman on cattle stations around his traditional country, and took other occassional jobs including working as a gold miner. He began painting in 1986, after the Central Desert art movement that began with the work of senior men at Papunya, began spreading out to other desert communities.

Kuddtji Kngwarreye paints his traditional country, the country for which he is a custodian, around Boundary Bore on the Utopia homelands. Significant throughout this country are the Emu Dreaming sites, where major men's initiation ceremonies are performed. The “Emu Dreaming” is one of Kudditji’s inherited ancestral totems, and is regularly referred to in his paintings.

Kudditji Kngwarreye’s early style consisted of symmetrically dotted paintings depicting the Emu Dreaming sites and ceremonies associated with Men's Business. During the mid 1990’s Kudditji began to experiment, replacing his previous fine dotting style with one that used densely applied paint to create broad sweeps of colour on the canvas. This imagery created something similar to the western landscape plane, and the paintings were romantic images of his country, concentrating on colour and form of the landscape. Strong images were being created of the intense skies of the desert rainy season and the extreme heat of high summer. These innovative paintings were slow to be accepted, and the artist returned to the more popular style of his finely dotted paintings.

In 2003 Kudditji began to exhibit the extraordinary, saturated colour paintings that have seen his reputation grow nationally and internationally. The new paintings, in fact, have several styles, and Kudditji has explored size of canvas as well as form in these intense, beautiful works. A sense of immense space can be felt in the "My Country" paintings, where massive blocks of stippled colour are laid alongside each other, sometimes using only two colours, while in other paintings a quilt of juxtaposed colours produces a landscape effect. These paintings hold close connections to the later paintings of his elder sister Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who was one of the great innovators in contemporary desert art.

Kuddtji Kngwarreye has been represented in major international exhibitions and has gained world wide recognition for his traditional depictions of his ancestral Dreamings.





Kudditji’s Story for artworks

Kudditji Kngwarreye paints aerial views of his county that reflect the changing seasons as well as the areas of spiritual significance.

Kudditji uses a heavily loaded paint brush to sweep broadly across the canvas in stages, similar to the western landscape plane, the reds and oranges of the shimmering summer heat and the depth of the sky in the Wet season These ground-breaking paintings express Kudditji’s extensive knowledge and love of his country in a way never seen before.

Solo Exhibitions

2006: My Country, Japingka Gallery Perth
2006: Masterwork, Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne
2006: Kudditji Kngwarreye: New Paintings, Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne
2005: Waterhole Aboriginal Art, Danks Street, Sydney.
2005: New Paintings, Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne
2005: Colours in Country, Art Mob, Hobart, Tasmania
2004: Waterhole Aboriginal Art, Sofitel Wentworth Hotel Exhibition, Sydney.
2004: My Country, Japingka Gallery Perth
2004: My Country, New Paintings, Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne
2003: New Paintings, Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne
1992: Tjukurrpa, Museum fur Volkerkunde, Basel

Group Exhibitions

2005: Big Country, Gallery Gondwana, Alice Springs
2005: Fresh from the Central Desert, Canberra Grammar School, Canberra
2004: Two Senior Men, Art Mob Gallery, Tasmania
2004: Australian Exhibition Centre, Chicago
2004: Heartbeat - Living Country, Wentworth Hotel, Sydney
2004: Spirit of Colour, Depot Gallery, Sydney
2002: The Contemporaries, Contemporary Artspace, Brisbane
1992: Tjukurrpa, Museum fur Volkerkunde, Basel, Switzerland
1991: Central Australian Aboriginal Art and Craft Exhibition, Araluen Centre, Alice Springs
1990: Art Dock, Contemporary Art from Australia, Noumea, New Caledonia

Collections

Araluen Art Centre, Alice Springs
R. M. Barokh Antiques, Los Angeles, California
Various private collections


“The Stockman and the Medicine Man” - JACK DALE and BILL WHISKEY TJAPALTJARRI

On Friday 31 August at 6.30pm, an exhibition of major works by two highly regarded senior lawmen and renowned artists, Jack Dale and Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri, will open at Japingka Gallery. This is the first time these two great painters, both in their 80s, have been shown together. Health permitting, Jack Dale will travel from his home in Derby for the opening.

Jack Dale, often referred to as the “Great Old Man of the Kimberley”, and Bill Whiskey, a renowned Medicine Man or traditional healer, both began painting late in life. In their highly acclaimed and individually unique works, both draw deeply on a wealth of traditional and spiritual knowledge of their respective countries.

Jack Dale, is one of the only surviving custodians of the great art sites of the Wandjina spirits of his country near Iminji in the remote central Kimberley region of Western Australia. Born at Mt House station to an Aboriginal mother and violent Scottish father, Jack witnessed many of the early atrocities perpetrated against his people. After his father died, having “killed himself on grog”, Jack returned to his maternal family and was brought into traditional Ngarinyin Law by his maternal grandfather at Lady Forrest Ranges, King Leopold. He went on to lead a remarkable life that bridged both cultures: he was a highly regarded head stockman and bushman as well as a respected tribal elder and lawman.

Jack began painting in the 1990s, when he was into his 70s, working with traditional ochre pigments. He uses his extensive cultural knowledge to record aspects of the Wandjina Dreaming sites of his people. This exhibition shows some of the finest of these grand ancestral spirits. Jack is assisted in his work by his wife, artist Biddy Dale, and other close members of his family, including his daughter Edna Dale. Today Jack spends his time between the Kimberley town of Derby and the community at Iminji on his traditional lands.

Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri, born in the 1920s at Pirupa Akla, is a Pitjantjatjara elder and traditional bush healer. His dynamic canvases record traditional rockhole sites near Pirupa, to the west of Ayers Rock. He also depicts the tract of country he later travelled through to Areyonga and the Haasts Bluff mission, where he worked as cook for the contract fencers and mustering crew. It was at this time that he began to be called Whiskers, due to his long white beard, a name that later evolved to Whiskey.

Bill Whiskey has only been painting since 2004, in which time his work has doubled in price. Most canvases are sold before they reach the walls, an unprecedented success, even in the Indigenous art world. Director of Japingka, Ian Plunkett, says: “Most of Whiskey’s canvases are sold before they reach the walls, an unprecedented success, even in the Indigenous art world.” His paintings, executed in the traditional dot style, exude a positive energy, reflecting his character – bold, subtly coloured and strong in spirit.
This important exhibition shouldn’t be missed by anyone interested in Indigenous art, or for those wanting to be introduced to it at its highest level.
The exhibition will be on display from 1 September to 5 October 2007. The gallery is open daily.
For further information, please contact Ian Plunkett (Gallery Director)
on (08) 9335 8265 or via email on japingka@iinet.net.au..
Gallery Hours: Mon - Fri: 10.00am - 5.30pm, Sat: 10.00am - 5.00pm, Sun: 12.00pm - 5.00pm. FREE ENTRY.
Exhibitions can be viewed online at: www.japingka.com.au.

Following on from the World Record price of just over $1,000,000 for an Australian Indigenous painting achieved at the recent Lawson Menzies Auction by the late, great Utopia Artist, Emily Kngwarreye, Japingka Gallery is featuring an Exhibition of new works from this highly regarded remote Community. The Artists of Utopia Exhibition showcases not only the work of Senior Artists who were contemporaries of Emily, but also artworks from the next generation from this remarkably talented Community.

Artists of Utopia is just one of an unprecedented three new exhibitions that will open at the same time in Japingka Gallery on Friday 15th June in Fremantle. These three Exhibitions will give viewers a real sense of the breadth and depth of styles and talent that is inherent in the Indigenous Fine Art Movement. The paintings feature styles and mediums from very different regions of Australia. From traditional ochre pigment paintings to the modern synthetic polymer paintings.

In Artists of Utopia twenty four artists from the uniquely named Utopia Homelands in Central Australia are exhibiting their wide-raging approach to painting. Recognised for their success at handing down the traditions through the generations, the age range of these artists is staggering. Polly Ngale (91) and Ally Kemarre (86) are amongst the elders, while younger artists like Janelle Stockman (30) are just starting out on their careers.

The exhibition highlights the continuing development of a major group of painters from one of the best known Central Desert art communities. Artists at Utopia have produced some of the most innovative and diverse artworks to come out of Australia’s heartlands. As senior artists pass on there are constantly new artists prepared to come forward to maintain the quality and integrity of art from their region.

In gallery2 Lisa Michl’s first exhibition in Western Australia will showcase the latest works from this north Queensland artist. Lisa’s connections are through her mother and grandmother’s side to the Kokoberrin language group of central west coast of Cape York Peninsula. Her paintings reflect the rhythms and traditional lifestyles of Kokoberrin culture. Lisa will attend the exhibition opening on Friday 15 June at 6.30pm.

Texas Downs, the colourfully named cattle station in the East Kimberley, has produced more than its fair share of successful artists. Father and daughter Churchill Cann and Charlene Carrington have combined in this exhibition to paint the history, landscape and traditional sites of Texas Downs, their home country. They are joined by Phyllis Thomas from the adjacent Purnululu (Bungle Bungles) region.

The exhibitions will be on display from 15th June to 13th July, and the gallery is open daily.

For further information, please contact Ian Plunkett (Gallery Director) on (08) 9335 8265 or via email on japingka@iinet.net.au.

Gallery Hours: Mon - Fri: 10.00am-5.30pm Sat: 10.00am–5.00pm Sun: 12.am–5.00pm.
FREE ENTRY.

Exhibitions can be viewed online at: www.japingka.com.au.


Linda Syddick Napaltjarri & Lorna Napurrula Fencer

Japingka Gallery is exhibiting two of the great innovators of Western Desert Art- Linda Syddick Napaltjarri and Lorna Napurrula Fencer. The exhibition opens on Friday 4th May at 6.30pm with the 2006 Telstra Painting Award artist, Linda Syddick attending, and will run until 8th June.

Linda Syddick Napaltjarri is rare amongst Pintupi artists for incorporating figures, whether they are Dreaming ancestors or spirit figures of relatives or historical figures, into her paintings of traditional country. Her unique style has won her national recognition in the Blake Prize for Religious Art as well as the NATSIAA Telstra Awards for Indigenous Art.

Linda left the desert around Lake McKay with her family when she was eight, to walk the 350 kilometre journey east to the mission settlement of Haasts Bluff. She is family to some of the famous artistic names of the Papunya Tula era- father Shorty Lankata, uncles Uta Uta Tjungala and Nosepeg Tjapurrula, cousin Ronnie Tjampitjinpa.

Linda began her own painting career 20 years ago. It is the oral tradition of Linda Syddick’s nomadic Pintupi heritage, with its rich storytelling history, that comes through in her wonderful paintings. “When she’s painting, Linda becomes the people in the painting. She speaks with them, and records their story. She goes back in time and place to the events that she is painting about.”

A tribute exhibiton to the late, great artist Lorna Napurrula Fencer (1923- 2006) is being shown in gallery2. This is also a celebration of the close relationship between Lorna and Japingka Gallery, and includes works from the last year of the painter’s life. The artist was named in this year’s list of top 50 collectible artists in Australia, and is in major collections including the Australian National Gallery.

Napurrula is recognised as an artist who uses colour with great impact, carefully considering the effect as she lays down the paint on canvas. Her large epic paintings created in the eighth decade of her life were final and compelling statements about the power of the great Warlpiri stories that she painted for over twenty years.

Lorna was identified with the Napurrula- Nakamarra creation stories from her birth place Yumurrpa. These ceremonial stories re-enact the myths of the Ancestors who pulled out the first Yarla, or bush potato, from the earth around the underground water source at Yurmurrpa. Embedded in the swirling shapes of the bush potato leaves are the “U” shapes of the Napurrula and Nakamarra women, who remain the custodians and the beneficiaries of their great Ancestors’ achievements.

When the Wangkatjungka people who lived in and around the remote Kimberley region which later became known as The Canning Stock Route first came into contact with the Kartiya (white people) in 1906, little did they know of the momentous chain of events that this inauspicious First Contact would set in motion. The misunderstandings, resettlement, killings and hardship came full circle in 1996 when all of the people from the region came together to paint the historic, monumental “Ngurrara” collaborative canvas to underpin their Native Title claim.

This historic canvas is echoed in the new collaborative works that document the innate connection between the Wangkatjungka people and their country and form the basis of the new “Wangkatjungka – Mapping Country” Exhibition at Japingka Gallery. Each individual artist has painted the waterholes and landmarks of the part of the country for which they are the traditional custodian.

When a large group of Wangkatjungka people turned up on the southern boundaries of Christmas Creek station sometime around 1940, word quickly spread that more families had arrived from the desert homelands. It had been a 200 km walk across saltpan country on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert.

The group had settled at a bore while they waited for their countrymen, stockmen on the station, to make contact. While they camped there many of the people became ill from some mystery whitefella disease that attached to the station country. The epidemic proved fatal to many of the old people.

It was the children that survived, and were brought into the life on the station by their relatives or other clan members. As elders, Willie Kew, George Tuckerbox and Myuapu Elsie Thomas can recall the great exodus they participated in. Others like Peter Goodijie can recall first contact with the white stockmen on the Canning Stock Route around 1930.

All these old people vividly recall their lives growing up on the ancestral lands, moving between waterholes with their extended families, learning the secrets of the country. As the elders and the senior artists of Wangkatjungka community, 120 kms S-E of the Kimberley town of Fitzroy Crossing, they began recording their stories on canvas in the 1990’s.

Now a selection of their large shared canvases can be seen at Japingka Gallery, in an exhibition entitled Wangkatjungka- Mapping Country. Senior artists from the community are scheduled to attend the opening on Friday 23 March at 6.30pm.

Wangkatjungka- Mapping Country- Gallery1 Mar 23, 2007 – Apr 27, 2007 Paintings from Wangkatjungka artists who left their desert homelands in the 1940s and traveled north along the Canning Stock Route or walked cross-country towards the Kimberley cattle stations. Collaborative paintings recreate the waterholes, the seasonal changes to country, and family links between clan groups.

ARTISTS OF WATIYAWANU

For furth

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