Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula

Painted for Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs in 1990 (catalogue number TT900657)

Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne

Private Collection, Melbourne

Acquired from the above by the present owner with the assistance of Tim Klingender Fine Art, Sydney

Djamu Gallery, Sydney, Mapping our Countries, October 8, 1999 - February 28, 2000

Preparing for battle. A group of warriors at a secret cave site at Mitukatjirri, southeast of the present day Pintupi community of Kintore, travelled to the claypan at Ilyingaungau where they straighten shafts of the thin stems of the mulyati tree over the shimmering heat of a fire to make spears. They had been challenged by a group of men for Tjikari in the north. Following the skirmish, the Mitukatjirri men returned home to conduct ceremonies.

Straightening the Spears at Ilyingaungau is the third in a series of paintings on the theme made by Tjupurrula in 1990. The series is regarded as among the most influential on the style of Pintupi painting for years to follow. The paintings evolved out of the Pintupi artists’ archetypal matrices of place and journey, the regular grids of concentric circles linked by sets of parallel lines seen in ceremonial ground mosaics, and developed and elaborated on canvas by Uta Uta Tjangala, Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Willy Tjungurrayi and Simon Tjakamarra in the 1980s.

The first in the series is 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 The second, Mitukatjirri and Tjikari Men’s spear fight at Ilyingaungau is in the collection of Supreme Court of the Northern Territory in Darwin.²

The bare, parallel bands of meticulously applied lines of dotting are said to resemble spears.³ Although modulated by the weight of the artist’s touch, these densely set lines create an optical sensation that evokes the shimmer of heat emanating off sand dunes in the arid deserts of inland Australia. Another source of inspiration suggested by the art historian Vivien Johnson is that Tjupurrula may have been influenced by an unusual vertical rock formation at Ilyingaungau. While physical phenomena may indeed be a visual influence on the rhythmical marks made by Tjupurrula, it is a landscape thrumming with ancestral energies that lies at the heart of these paintings.

¹ Lüthi, B. (ed.), Aratjara, Art of the First Australians: Traditional and contemporary works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, DuMont, Cologne, 1993, p.260, plate 106. The exhibition opened at the Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf and travelled to the Hayward Gallery, London, the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

² Perkins, H. and H. Fink [eds.] illustrate both paintings in Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in association with Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, 2000, pp.114-5 and pp.116-7 respectively.

³ Johnson, V., Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 2008, p. 167.