Nyapanyapa Yunupingu’s Djorra Drawings

Installation view of Nyapanyapa Yunupingu’s “Djorra” (2014-15)

“I am drawing on paper. These are not special stories. I am drawing my ideas. Stories from my head. I am still working. Drawing lines, work like this one…I am drawing trees on my paper. The picture is about the trees. More branches on that tree. As I am working on my story, I am thinking of the next one.”–Nyapanyapa Yunupingu

This work is on view in Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia through September 9, 2018.

The Great Salt Lake Tjitjiti in Carlene West’s Paintings

Installation view of Carlene West’s work in Marking the Infinite.

Whereas Carlene West’s early work conforms closely to traditional iconography, after returning to Tjitjiti in 2009— the first time since her childhood—her style underwent a rapid transformation. Formal symbolic and narrative elements receded, giving way to more expressive painting. Depicted in swaths of white, the great salt lake Tjitjiti also found greater prominence. West’s paintings offer a metaphor for the connection between place and Indigenous identity. Anthropologist John Carty notes, “Carlene’s marks are the traces of meaningful action; of the actions that made the world, and that continue to make the world meaningful; of the artist becoming an ancestor.”

This work is on view in Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia through September 9, 2018.

How Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s Syaw Painting Preserve Lost Knowledge

Detail of Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s “Syaw (Fishnet)”

The patterns in this painting mimic the stitch and weave of the syaw, large cylindrical fishnets made from the pinbin (bush vine). With the imposition of mission life, knowledge of how to make the nets vanished. Regina Pilawuk Wilson sought to revive the lost art in 2014 when she traveled to the distant outstation of Yilan to learn from Freda Wyartja and sisters Lily and Bonnie Roy. In turn, Wilson has taught the stitch to younger generations in primary schools. Her paintings are similarly a conscious attempt to revitalize lost traditions, showing that persistence and change coexist in Ngan’gikurrungurr culture.

This work is on view in Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia through September 9, 2018.