Pijaju Peter Skipper

Painted at Mangkaja Art Centre, Fitzroy Crossing, in 1996

Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London, acquired from the above

Private Collection, Devon, acquired from the above in 1996 or 1997

Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London

Pijaju Peter Skipper was one of the main contributors to the two monumental Ngurrara canvases that he and thirty-nine other artists – Walmajarri, Mangala, Juwaliny, Wankajunga and Manjilarra language speakers from the Great Sandy Desert – painted as evidence of their ancestrally endowed ownership of Country to support their land claim under Native Title legislation in 1997.² The term ‘ngurrara’ means home, a place one has feeling for. The five groups had been removed from their traditional lands right up until the 1960s and 1970s to make way for pastoralism and mining - neither of which ever prospered in the region - and the area has been left practically uninhabited. Ten years after the Ngurrara II was painted, their ownership of land was acknowledged under Australian law.

In 1996, the same year in which he painted Jila Japirnka, Skipper was also instrumental in the painting of the prototype for the large canvas, Ngurrara I, now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, which was sold on behalf of the community by Sotheby’s in 2003 to raise funds to house the second Ngurrara canvas in the community.³

In both Ngurrara paintings, Skipper’s depiction of his main freshwater well, Japirnka, stands out as a large, green cloverleaf-like design similar to that in Jila Japirnka. The motif represents the rock formations at the site where Kurtal, the ancestral lawgiver in the form of a snake, can emerge from the jila in all four directions. As in the large canvases, Japirnka is surrounded by the sixty or so minor water sources in the area and bounded by what Skipper called a ‘fence’, a notional protective boundary that features prominently in Jila Japirnka.

For earlier versions of Jila Japirnka see Jila Japingka, 1987, in Sutton, P., (ed), Dreamings. The art of Aboriginal Australia, Viking, in association with The Asia Society Galleries, Melbourne and New York, 1988, p. 100, fig. 141, cat. 66; and Jila Japingka II, 1989, in Croft, B., Indigenous Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2001, p. 52.

¹ Pajaju Peter Skipper in Ngurrara – The Great Sandy Desert Canvas, South Australian Museum, exhibition brochure, 2008.

² Ngurrara II, 1997, in Caruana, W., Aboriginal Art, Thames and Hudson World of Art series, 2012, p. 165, plate 142.

³ Sotheby’s, Sydney, Aboriginal Art, July 28-29, 2003, lot 246.