1. Papunya Tula And Utopia
Indigenous Art
Papunya Tula
And
Utopia

2. A Place called Papunya
The emergence of 'dot' paintings by Indigenous men from the western deserts of Central Australia in the early 1970s has been called the greatest art movement of the twentieth century. Prior to this, most cultural material by Indigenous Australians1 was collected by anthropologists. Consequently, collections were found in university departments or natural history museums worldwide, not art galleries.
That all changed at a place called Papunya4. Papunya was a 'sit-down' place established in the early 1960s, 240 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory (NT). The settlement brought together people from several western desert language groups: the Pintupi, Warlpiri, Arrernte (Aranda), Luritja, and the Anmatyerr, who were unaccustomed to living in close proximity to each other. Papunya was described as a 'centralised government settlement established as a marshalling point for Aboriginal people displaced5 from their traditional lands' (Curator Hetti Perkins, Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Art Gallery of New South Wales6, 2000).

3. Where is Papunya?
Papunya lies close to the Tropic of Capricorn, in the far southwest corner of Australia's Northern Territory. The settlement is 240 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs. This map shows sites of significance in the area.

4. Papunya Tula
In 1971 art teacher Geoffrey Bardon had been appointed to the school at Papunya. He had found a dispossessed and dispirited community, struggling to maintain cultural practices against the full force of the assimilationist policy12..
A simple school mural project brought Bardon into contact with senior men who were custodians for the Tjukurrpa (ancestral stories)13. Although Bardon encouraged the children to draw their own stories, the senior men did not permit them to do the drawings. The senior men's mural (known only through photographs as it was painted over by the administration soon after it was made) started the process of transcribing body markings and sand drawings onto more conventional painting supports. The so-called 'dot and circle' style had been born.
Bardon encouraged the elders to paint using 'no whitefella way.' Painting The Honey Ant Mural (June–August 1971) empowered them, and they began to make small paintings of their Tjukurrpa on any available surface, including scraps of board and corrugated iron. Bardon supplied them with acrylic paints and canvas, and by early 1972 a painting area had been set up in the storeroom of the Town Hall hut.
Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra Size 61 x 55cm Date 2009

5. The Honey Ant Mural

7. The Men's Painting Room,
Papunya - June-August 1971
Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula can be seen in the middle ground painting a Kalinypa Water Dreaming. His two boomerangs are placed in front of the board as percussion instruments, ready to be used to accompany the verses of the Water Dreaming, sung at intervals during the painting process.

8. Papunya Tula
The Papunya Tula painting style derives directly from the artists' knowledge of traditional body and sand painting associated with ceremony. To portray these dreamtime creation stories for the public, has required the removal of sacred symbols and the careful monitoring of ancestral designs.
The work of the Papunya Tula artists is highly regarded. The high standard of the work and its unmistakable and powerful style has resulted in the Papunya Tula artists being represented in most public galleries, major museums, institutions and many large private collections within Australia as well as overseas.
The aim of the company is to promote individual artists, provide economic development for the communities to which they belong, and assist in the maintenance of a rich cultural heritage.
Vivianne West Nakamarra Size 46 x 38cm Date 2011

9. Papunya Tula
Papunya Tula Artists is entirely owned and directed by traditional Aboriginal people from the Western Desert. The aim of the company is to promote individual artists, to provide economic development for the communities to which they belong, and assist in the maintenance of a rich cultural heritage.
Artists and their family wait on the lawn of the Todd Mall for the annual exhibition to open. 2010

10. Exhibition Space Papunya Tula
‘The company, initially based in the Papunya area, has met the challenges posed by the homelands movement in the last decade, and now extends its operations into Western Australia (covering an area which extends to 700km west of Alice Springs).

11. Papunya Tula
“The work of the Papunya Tula artists is highly regarded. The high standard of the work and its unmistakable and powerful style has resulted in the Papunya Tula artists being represented in most public galleries, major museums, institutions and many large private collections within Australia as well as overseas.
The aim of the company is to promote individual artists, provide economic development for the communities to which they belong, and assist in the maintenance of a rich cultural heritage. “

12.
Papunya ABC Report

13. Utopia

14. Where is Utopia
The region of Utopia is approximately 270 km north east of Alice Springs, NT.

15. Where is Utopia?
The Utopia region is located 240 kilometres north east of Alice Springs. It is home to around 2000 people, mainly Alyawarre speakers, who live in twenty five outstations flanking the Sandover River.
The region was named Utopia by the first white settlers in 1927, apparently in anticipation of an idyllic life after they found rabbits so tame that they could be caught easily by hand. The reality proved rather different for them. It has an arid climate with low rainfall and long hot summers, frosty winter nights and only limited vegetation cover on the sandy red soils.
When European pastoralists settled in Utopia in the 1920s, the Aboriginal owners were forced to move away from their country and ceremonial sites and instead lived near the various homesteads.

16. Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Emily Kame Kngwarreye was born early this century, probably around No specific date is known as Aboriginal births were not compulsorily recorded until the 1960s. She was born on the eastern edge of her father’s country, Alhalkere and grew up in the traditional Alhalkere way, absorbing the ‘spirit’ of the country. An important part of her education was learning awelye or women’s business, ceremonies associated with women’s social structure and ritual knowledge. Awelye also describes the painted designs and images associated with women’s rituals.

17. In 1977 Kngwarreye, with some other women from Utopia, attended a bush workshop to learn about batik. This was her first experience with non-indigenous materials and techniques. The following year the women formed the Utopia Women’s Batik Group which became known for beautiful, fluid designs on silk. It was with this group that Kngwarreye made her first trip to Adelaide in 1981, accompanying the exhibition Floating Forests of Silk. In 1988 Kngwarreye had her first experience of painting in acrylics on canvas and she quickly adapted the techniques and iconography of batik to this new and more direct creative process.
Images (top to bottom): Aerial view of spinifex foothills with ghost gums. Spinifex

18. Alhalkere Country
Alhalkere is the name of the country of Emily Kame Kngwarrye’s father and grandfather. It gained its name from a rock formation of the same name, eroded away from the escarpment. Kngwarreye painted Alhalkere from a ‘traditional’ perspective, surveying her landscape with a spiritual eye. Her role was to learn its ancient history and all its physical characteristics as well as the responsibilities associated with maintaining the continuity of the land. Alhalkere is the home to the Yam Dreaming site from which Kngwarreye takes her bush name, Kame. Yam seed was therefore one of her most important Dreamings.

19. Yam 1989 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 90.0 x 60.0cm
'Kame [yam seed], that's me.' This was said as Kngwarreye cupped her hands together in the manner of intekwe, the pod that holds the Kame seeds.
Her dots vary from fine to coarse, from single to triple, and in concert they evoke the rhythm of dancing, the dynamism of growth and the life force of nature as windborne seeds scatter across the land. The changing seasons and the night skies can be sensed in the expansive and shifting tonalities of Emily's palette.

20. Christopher Hodges, artist
Earth's Creation 1994 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. 4 panels, each x 160.0cm
She was profoundly influenced by the colours in the landscape and worked the lushness of the land into many of her paintings.
Christopher Hodges, artist
Works in this section, completed during 1992 and 1993, have been described as belonging to Emily's 'high-colourist' phase, characterised by a rapid succession of intensely high-keyed works in hot pinks, oranges and electric blues. Emily's palette was largely determined by the changing seasons. Dusty browns appear in her canvases during the dry season, and greens appear after the rains, which Emily referred to as 'green time'

21. Waterlilies, Green Reflection, Left Part Claude Monet
SIMILARITIES between Monet and Kngwarreye??

22. The body is a site of significance. Anne Marie Brody, curator
Untitled (Awelye) 1994 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 6 panels, each x 56.7cm.
The body is a site of significance.
Anne Marie Brody, curator
The genesis of Emily's mark-making lies in painting linear designs on women's bodies for ceremonies known as Awelye. Painted in the first half of 1994, they belong to a body of work, mostly series of panels, in which Emily directly explores the linear forms of body designs and scarification marks as a primary subject of painting.

24. Big Yam 1996 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 4 panels, each 159
Big Yam 1996 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 4 panels, each x 270.0cm, overall x 401.0cm.
The organic tracery of interconnecting lines seen in the masterpiece Big Yam Dreaming bears a resemblance to the crazed pattern of cracked earth on the surface of the ground where the yam vine grows, and mirrors the network of arterial roots reaching deep for water in the dry desert sands. Although the presence of the yam is evident in the lines that define its roots, these lines also symbolise the ancestral connections that have been passed down through the Dreaming. Lines mesh and weave and refer to a wholeness that recalls the netting work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama or Paul Klee's concept of 'taking a line for a walk'.

25. Untitled 1996 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 152.3 x 91.7cm
The action of the threshing and winnowing of the native grasses is sensed in the character of these lines.
Margo Neale, curator
Works referred to by Emily as 'sacred grasses' were mostly completed in 1996, the last year of her life. These paintings reveal a speed and energy that belie her advanced years. Sensed in these works is the action of grasses being winnowed by the wind to release the seeds that are ground to make seed cakes for ceremonies and everyday sustenance.

26. My Country 1996 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 58.0 x 87.5cm
The lines and dots that dominated the surface in her previous works vanish into broad, gestural strokes swept across the surface as slabs of strident colours composed in sections. Many are lushly painted, and every movement of the brush is visible in creamy folds of paint over a characteristic black background. By contrast, one of these last paintings is nearly devoid of colour. Its all-over subtle whitish-beige tints resonate with Kazimir Malevich's famous painting White on White 1918, in which he was said to have painted himself out of the picture. It was as if she were signing off. Her end was a new beginning.