Paintings by Spinifex Artists are embedded with records of constellations, creation stories, landscape, fauna, and major songlines of the Great Victoria Desert. Now based in Tjuntjuntjara community in Western Australia, near the South Australian border, the Spinifex People (known locally as Anangu) were dispossessed and dispersed when atomic tests were undertaken on their Country at Maralinga in the 1950s. Title to their homelands was formally returned in 2001, and painting has formed an important part of the Spinifex Peoples’ account of connection to Country.
These stories are captured in On Our Country, particularly through the painting Kungkarangkalpa by senior Spinifex artist Ngalpingka Simms. It’s a pulsing network of connected lines, circles and dots in bright red, yellow, orange, purple and blue, hovering on a black background. This vibrant web tells the Seven Sisters Creation story, which involves a long, arduous journey undertaken by a group of young women in flight from a pursuing male. Also included in On Our Country is an epic Women’s Collaborative painting, which is another collective telling of this story of Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters).
In the work of Myrtle Pennington, also a senior artist, landscape is imbued with layers of spirituality, history and ceremony. Her painting Kanpala has a dense background of dappled reds and oranges. Patches and thick lines of pale blue and purple expand out from the centre, as if to form an aerial map of sandhills, salt lakes and rocky escarpments.
On Our Country will be the tenth exhibition of paintings by Spinifex Artists, highlighting how the artists have been reconnecting with waterholes and Dreaming sites that their families were forced to leave over half a century ago. Painting is one of many ways that their stories are retold and recorded.
On Our Country
Spinifex Artists
Japingka Gallery
6 November–21 December
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Ahead of his major retrospective at Jan Murphy Gallery, Ben Quilty spoke with fellow painter Georgia Spain about wrestling with mythology, the contradictions of joy and suffering, and a belief in art as an antidote to an increasingly volatile world.
Josina Pumani’s electric ceramic work Maralinga—recently recognised at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards— deftly excavates a long-hidden past.
