Maureen Baker

My Grandmother's Country

2024

Yannima Tommy Watson is a Pitjantjatjara artist born around the 1930s, in the bush some 44km west of the small isolated community of Irrunytju. Not yet very well known to the French public, despite his participation in the architectural project of the Musée du Quai Branly, Tommy Watson is nevertheless often considered the greatest living Aboriginal artist. Like many aborigines of his generation, he lived a traditional, nomadic or semi-nomadic life before his contact with Western civilization; then he will occupy the only jobs that the Aborigines find: herdsmen (until Yuendumu), laborers for the construction of infrastructures in the desert. Throughout this period he became familiar with his "country", a harsh region, and deepened his knowledge, both profane and sacred, relating to Dreams and Dreamtimes, to the connections between sacred sites and the Ancestors. He will even work in Papunya, where the artistic movement started. But the Pijantjarra are intransigent with tradition…no question at this time of revealing the motives and the secret stories. The North of South Australia, the region where he is from, was touched by the pictorial movement only at the very beginning of the 2000s. In 2001, Tommy began his career as an artist in Irrunytju (Wingellina). He is a young artist… He learns by observing other painters and draws on the experiences of a long life and on the exceptional knowledge he has stored up. But quickly he will find his way, a radically new style where color plays a major role. Very quickly, the iconography now well known by the artists of Yuendumu, or the Western Desert, Balgo or Lajamanu disappeared. The symbols are no longer there. As Rover Thomas, Emily Kame or Paddy Bedford had done before him, this is a real artistic revolution. For Tommy, it is not a question of describing his Dream (Caterpillar), the routes taken by the Ancestors. He concentrates on a site, a story, sometimes very profane, the memory of a meeting, of a hunting party, tries to condense his memories, the information of which he is the depositary, to add a poetic touch to it, sometimes melancholy, and this gives a painting with a very abstract aspect. It is a painting where the emotion is very present, undoubtedly less cerebral than the art of the neighbors of the north the Pintupi, like Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, George...

As one of the last generation to remember a childhood lived in the desert hunting and gathering with her family, Walangkura Napanangka's paintings recall the stories of country and the location of specific sites in her traditional homeland west of the salt lake of Karrkurutinjinya (Lake Macdonald). Born around 1946, at Tjitururrnga west of Kintore, in the remote and arid country between the Northern Territory and Western Australia, she lived with her father Rantji Tjapangati and mother Inyuwa Nampitjinpa and later, while still a teenager, travelled by foot with her family over the hundreds of kilometres from their remote desert home eventually joining Uta Uta Tjangala's group as they walked in to the settlements of Haasts Bluff and then Papunya. The lure of settlement life with its promise of plentiful food and water belied the harsh conversion they would make to an alien lifestyle with its many problems and unfamiliar demands. The upheaval however, was ameliorated to some degree by the proximity of her immediate family including her mother Inyuwa, adoptive father Tutuma Tjapangati, and sister Pirrmangka Napanangka (now deceased) all of whom became artists. Relocated to the community of Kintore in 1981 when the outstation movement began, Walangkura participated in the historic women's collaborative painting project (1994) that was initiated by the older women as a means of re-affirming their own spiritual and ancestral roots. It was a time of specifically female singing, ceremony and painting, away from the gaze of outsiders and men folk. The huge and colourful canvases that emerged from the women's camp were 'alive with the ritual excitement and narrative intensity of the occasion' (Johnson 2000: 197). Within a year, Papunya Tula Artists, now established at Kintore, had taken on many of these women as full-time artists, revitalising the company after the deaths of many of the original 'painting men'. While individual women forged their own stylistic trajectory, these paintings were immediately distinguishable from the men's more cerebral and symmetrical style. They radiated an exuberant and vibrant energy, the felt heart-beat of women's affinity to country and spirit. Walangkura's early works, created from 1996 onward, are characterized by masses of small markings and motifs covering large areas of canvas. Her favorite colour, a deep sandy orange predominates, accentuated against more somber blacks and reds and dusky greens or yellows. More recent works show a gestural quality though still tightly packed with an intensity of geometric line work representing sandhills. In a sense this provides a strong visual and contextual link to the men's linear style as exemplified by the works of George Tjungurrayi...

As one of the last generation to remember a childhood lived in the desert hunting and gathering with her family, Walangkura Napanangka's paintings recall the stories of country and the location of specific sites in her traditional homeland west of the salt lake of Karrkurutinjinya (Lake Macdonald). Born around 1946, at Tjitururrnga west of Kintore, in the remote and arid country between the Northern Territory and Western Australia, she lived with her father Rantji Tjapangati and mother Inyuwa Nampitjinpa and later, while still a teenager, travelled by foot with her family over the hundreds of kilometres from their remote desert home eventually joining Uta Uta Tjangala's group as they walked in to the settlements of Haasts Bluff and then Papunya. The lure of settlement life with its promise of plentiful food and water belied the harsh conversion they would make to an alien lifestyle with its many problems and unfamiliar demands. The upheaval however, was ameliorated to some degree by the proximity of her immediate family including her mother Inyuwa, adoptive father Tutuma Tjapangati, and sister Pirrmangka Napanangka (now deceased) all of whom became artists. Relocated to the community of Kintore in 1981 when the outstation movement began, Walangkura participated in the historic women's collaborative painting project (1994) that was initiated by the older women as a means of re-affirming their own spiritual and ancestral roots. It was a time of specifically female singing, ceremony and painting, away from the gaze of outsiders and men folk. The huge and colourful canvases that emerged from the women's camp were 'alive with the ritual excitement and narrative intensity of the occasion' (Johnson 2000: 197). Within a year, Papunya Tula Artists, now established at Kintore, had taken on many of these women as full-time artists, revitalising the company after the deaths of many of the original 'painting men'. While individual women forged their own stylistic trajectory, these paintings were immediately distinguishable from the men's more cerebral and symmetrical style. They radiated an exuberant and vibrant energy, the felt heart-beat of women's affinity to country and spirit. Walangkura's early works, created from 1996 onward, are characterized by masses of small markings and motifs covering large areas of canvas. Her favorite colour, a deep sandy orange predominates, accentuated against more somber blacks and reds and dusky greens or yellows. More recent works show a gestural quality though still tightly packed with an intensity of geometric line work representing sandhills. In a sense this provides a strong visual and contextual link to the men's linear style as exemplified by the works of George Tjungurrayi...

Ronnie Tjampitjinpa was born around 1943 at Tjiturrunya, about 100km west of the Kintore ranges in Western Australia. Following an extended drought in the 1950s, Ronnie's family move...

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A few words of the artist about his art: When i painting landscapes, I usually choose simple geometric arrangements, contrasts of verticals and levels. I juxtapose the smooth surface of the sky with the rough texture of earth or grass. I paint symmetrical reflections in water and rhythmic repetitions of trees. Even an ordinary, seemingly uninteresting fragment of the suburban landscape hides a beauty that I want to see and then transfer to the canvas. I am inspired by nature because it contains a hidden secret of existence. For me, painting it is a reflection on life and passing away. It is an attempt to capture the imperceptible essence, to paint what cannot be seen. I think that my paintings can be a respite, an antidote for a man tired of technology, constant rush, hustle and bustle of the city. Grzegorz Wójcik...