MATHAMAN MARIKA

Painted at Yirrkala, North East Arnhem Land, circa 1959
Sandra Le Brun Holmes, Darwin
Jerome Gould, Los Angeles, purchased from the the above in 1969
Private collection

The bark is housed behind perspex and is in a flat state with only fine hairline cracks and a small crack 15cm from the top right-hand corner, approximately 7cm long. The entire surface has suffered significant pigment loss over the entire bark. The worst areas being in the lower register
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Cf. For a related work, painted by Mathaman in collaboration with his brother Mawalan and his nephew Wandjuk Marika, see Djang'kawu Myth No.1, 1959, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Morphy, H., Aboriginal Art, Phaidon, London, 1998, p.244, pl.165. For paintings of major ancestral narratives by the artist, see Wagilag Sisters story, 1960, in Capon, E. et al, Gamarada: Friends, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, p.32; and Wagilag Ceremony, 1963, in Ryan, J., Spirit in Land: Bark paintings from Arnhem Land in the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1990, p.39, pl.12, illus.

The subject of the painting is the story of the ancestral Djang'kawu who gave birth to the Dhuwa clans of eastern Arnhem Land. The central panel features a circular woven mat in which babies are protected from the elements. To either side are the Djang'kawu's decorated digging sticks which they plunged into the ground to create freshwater wells, and which in turn transformed into casuarina trees. The two Djang'kawu and their digging sticks are depicted again in the lower panel. The upper register of the painting shows Buwada, the bush turkeys that the Djang'kawu encountered upon arriving at Yalangbara on the east coast of Arnhem Land; the vertical zig-zag in the middle of this panel is the mark left by Djanda the Goanna's tail as it climbed the sand dunes at Yalangbara.