PADDY TJAMATJI (JAMPIN)

Acquired after use in a ceremony to mark the occasion of the opening of the Balangarri office, Warmun (Turkey Creek).
This painting was purchased directly from the artist in 1983 by Bill Jennet (known to the people of Warmun as "Dollar Bill"). Mr Jennet was the community bookkeeper at Warmun in 1983, and this painting remained in his possession until August 1997, at which point it was sold via Mary Macha to a private collector. 

The plywood board has been crudely cut from a larger piece prior to use in the ceremony, and the corners are worn down and rough. The board has been attached to a cedar stretcher and housed in a contemporary hardwood box frame. There is significant pigment loss to many areas of the red, yellow and black natural earth pigments, and many of the white pigmented dots used to highlight the image have fallen away. The painting was stabalised by a professional conservator in 1987 and there appears to have been no recent pigment loss.
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Cf. Paddy Jaminji (Tjamatji) and Rover Thomas, The spirits Jimpi and Manginta, 1983, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, in Thomas, R. et al, Roads Cross: The paintings of Rover Thomas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p.29, illus.; and Paddy Tjamajti, Jimpi the devil-devil, c.1978, in the collection of the National Museum of Australia, in Taylor, L. (ed.), Painting the Land Story, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 1999, p.25, illus; for a discussion of Mary Macha's early recollections of her encounters with Tjamatji see Mary Macha in McCullough, S., Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2001, p.118.

Tjamatji was the original painter of the boards carried in the public Gurirr Gurirr ceremonies which commenced in the mid 1970s in the East Kimberley. The image on this board shows evidence of having been repainted on more than one occasion indicating that the board had been used in several Gurirr Gurirr ceremonies.

The Gurirr Gurirr ceremony and its associated narratives, songs, choreography and imagery was revealed to Rover Thomas (c.1926-98), in the aftermath of Cyclone Tracy destroying Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974, by the spirit of a female relative who died from injuries suffered in a car accident on a road near Turkey Creek: the road had flooded because of the cyclone. This painting depicts the two spirits, Jimpi and Manginta, who accompanied the spirit of the dead woman across the Kimberley to her home in the east. There she witnessed the cyclone, in the form of a Rainbow Serpent attacking Darwin.

As is customary, the owner of a ceremony engages relatives in a specific kin group to execute the paintings on the boards used in ritual. Chief among these was Tjamatji, who was Rover's classificatory mother's brother, and whose ancestral country was in the eastern Kimberley. For an appreciation of Tjamatji's seminal contribution to the East Kimberley painting movement, see Akerman, K., 'I Bin Paint'im First': Paddy Jaminji - Trail-blazing Artist of the Warmun School of Aboriginal Art, in the catalogue of the artist's exhibition, Paddy Jaminji, at the Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth, 2004

Mary Macha recalls being astounded upon first seeing a Gurirr Gurirr painting by Tjamatji:

'Paddy [Jaminji] showed it to me, then the group took it touring with them while they performed the ceremony all over the Kimberley and the Northern Territory - bouncing around on the back of the truck for well over a year. More paintings were added and, of course, they suffered somewhat in their travels. Snails were squashed on them, the dogs walked over them, they had things spilt on them and they were covered in dust. But were they powerful!

'Eventually Paddy said I could buy them and they painted others. This happened three times over about three years. But no one would buy the first collection. Eventually Lord McAlpine [a major collector of Aboriginal art, for whom Macha was art consultant] bought the first and third collections. Now they are in the Australian Museum, Sydney. Professor Ronald Berndt bought the second for the University of Western Australia' (ibid.)