This painting is about my father’s Country and about arnwekety [bush plum]. The flowers are there, the little bush plum flowers. That bush plum is my father’s Dreaming. That bush plum comes from Ahalpere country. It has little white flowers, then after that there is the fruit. If it doesn’t rain, the plants are dry; if it rains there is an abundance of bush plums. The flower is small when they have just come out...well, after that the fruit comes. The fruits are really nice when they are ripe.
by Henry Skerritt, Ph.D
Assistant Professor, University of Virginia
Carl H. and Martha S. Lindner Center for Art History
In 1989, the Utopia painting movement burst forth like a desert storm with the exhibition A Summer Project, at Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery. The survey marked the arrival of a major new painting movement, but it was a storm that had been brewing for some time. Like most of the artists in A Summer Project, Angelina Pwerle had been engaged with artmaking for some time. Before commencing painting, she had been a member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group, which had formed in the 1970s. In 1988, Pwerle contributed a work to the Utopia: A Picture Story exhibition, marking the culmination of the batik movement.
In a career spanning four decades, the motif of anwekety (bush plum) has come to define Pwerle’s practice, although, as Anne Marie Brody notes, it was neither her first nor the only subject that she has explored.² And yet, while there are other themes—from the rugged marks of her awelye body paint designs or the Pop Art luminescence of her quirky figurative paintings—Pwerle has continued to return to anwekety, which finds delicate expression in her patiently loving hand.
Anwekety is one of the major Altyerr (Dreamings) of Ahalpere, Pwerle’s patrilineal estate. A type of bush tucker with needle-like leaves and small, round edible berries, the fruit collected by the women is to be eaten fresh, dried or mixed into paste. Viewed from above, the changing seasonal colours of the bush plum dominate the flora on the ground in Ahalpere country. The story of the bush plum is crucial to Alyawarr and Anmatyerr women’s ceremonies and is intricately intertwined with the songlines of the whole country. It is a story not only of physical nourishment, but also of spiritual sustenance, being closely connected to the sacredness of Ahalpere country. In Pwerle’s paintings we are transported to her Country, a County she knows so intimately that it cannot be expressed in words, but which requires a language of intuition. These are women’s stories, told through generations as part of a contract with the landscape. This contract ensures its fertility, its regenerative power, and its ability to spiritually and physically nourish the Anmatyerr. Pwerle’s work offers a gentle reflection on the interconnectedness of all things, a sparkling meditation on Altyerr as it binds us all together.
Pwerle was one of a group of senior women who painted Anwekety at Camel Camp, one of eighteen or so small outstations spread across Utopia. Along with her relatives Polly Ngale and Gladdy Kemarre, they were the great poets of the bush plum. But while their subject was the same, their work cannot be confused. Ngale used thick, rough, overlapping dots, while Kemarre tended to build up planes of colored dots, using the tension between different sized and coloured dots to create shimmering constellations of fruit. It was Pwerle, however, who mastered the miniscule: covering her canvases with wisps of the finest dotting, shimmering across the canvas in constellations that ebb and flow in a grand tapestry creating a profound metaphor a metaphor the connection between the individual and the universal.
In 2014, I was invited by the collectors Debra and Dennis Scholl to curate the exhibition Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia, which would tour to six museums in the United States and Canada between 2016-19. The aim of the exhibition was to show the diversity of contemporary women’s practices, but also to make a clear argument of how these practices placed Aboriginal women at the vanguard of global contemporary art. Considering the importance of Utopia to the narrative of women’s painting in Australia, it seemed logical that we should include one of the leading contemporary practitioners. In 2013, Pwerle and Kemarre had spent several weeks staying with Marc Gooch and Janet Pierce in their Alice Springs home, during which time Pwerle produced one of her largest works: a 3 x 1.5 meter rendering of anwekety in white on red commissioned by William Nuttall of Niagara Gallery. After acquiring this work, which would be one of the centrepieces of Marking the Infinite, Pwerle was asked whether she would consider producing a companion piece of the same scale. The resulting piece (which is included in this sale), was a tour-de-force. Where the earlier version had used a combination of large and small dotting, in this work she blanketed the canvas in the finest of dots, a gentle enveloping blanket whose visual complexity raised inevitable comparisons to the Milky Way.
In my essay for the exhibition, I noted “Pwerle’s work encourages sensitivity to the minutiae of difference. While their uses of repetition create internal systems within which the viewer is drawn to identify variations, a constant tension is maintained between these individual parts and the whole.” In other words, as much as we might see the universe in Pwerle’s paintings, it is also impossible not to feel their motherly sense of empathy. The infinity of the universe is offset by the attention to detail; the beauty of small things; the nourishing power of a tiny berry; a place in the universe for all things.
[1] Angelina Pwerle, quoted in Chrischona Schmidt, “I Paint for Everyone’—The Making of Utopia Art” (PhD thesis, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, 251.
[2] Anne Marie Brody, “Angelina Pwerle: Bush Plum Odysseys,” in Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia, edited by Henry Skerritt (Nevada Museum of Art, 2015), 82.