TURKEY TOLSON TJUPURRULA | STRAIGHTENING SPEARS AT ILYINGAUNGAU

Painted at Kintore for Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, 1998

The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands

Kasper Konig, Emily Joyce Evans, Falk Wolf (eds.), Remembering Forward: Australian Aboriginal Painting Since 1960, London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2010, p.96-97, cat. no. 42. (illus.)

Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, who was one of the youngest members of the Papunya Tula painting movement when it began in the early 1970s, is renowned for the minimal linear dotted paintings of the last decade of his long career as an artist in the public domain. Straightening Spears at Ilyingaungau, 1998, belongs to a series of paintings that began in 1990 with a work of the same title now in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide which was shown in the ground-breaking exhibition of Aboriginal art that toured Europe in 1993-94, Aratjara: Art of the First Australians.¹ According to the art historian Vivien Johnson, the so-called ‘straightening spear’ paintings have been highly influential in the Western Desert painting movement, forming a ‘prototype of…striped paintings which have dominated Pintupi men’s painting since the end of the millennium’.² Furthermore they are ‘expressive of the austere intellect of [the artist].’³ 

The paintings relate to ancestral events in the artist’s country. Ilyingaungau is a rocky outcrop that was the destination of a large band of men from Mitukatjirri who had travelled through the site of Tjukula. At Ilyingaungau they were challenged to a battle by a group of men travelling from the north. Following the skirmish, the Mitukatjirri men returned home to conduct ceremonies. The parallel lines of modulated paint refer to the long thin strips of timber the Mitukatjirri men heated over fire to make spears straight with flexible shafts. While the parallel lines of red and yellow dotting are evocative of the heat of a flat desert landscape, Johnson surmises the original inspiration may have been a ‘striking vertical rock formation’ at the site of Ilyingaungau.⁴

1. See Lüthi, B. (ed.), Aratjara, Art of the First Australians: Traditional and contemporary works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, DuMont, Cologne, 1993, plate 106, p. 260.

2. Johnson, V., Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 2008, p. 167.

3. ibid.

4. ibid.

Wally Caruana