Artiste : Tjaruwa Woods

Titre de l'œuvre : Purpurnya

Format : 137 × 90 cm

Provenance et certificat : centre d'art aborigène du Spinifex Art Project

Référence de cette peinture : 15-006

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Explications pour cette œuvre :

Tjaruwa (1954) paints with a knowledge and a devotion to the country that formed her. She was a young woman when she and her immediate family 'walked in' from the Great Victoria Desert in the remote east of Western Australia. This was deemed inhospitable country by the encroaching 'new world' and perceived as so vast and uninhabited, that it made the ideal site to detonate and observe the new wave of nuclear explosions conducted as part of the British Atomic Testing during the 1950's.

Tjaruwa and her family were there, living, breathing, hunting, walking over the soft red carpet of sand, learning the paths of the creation beings who shaped this landscape and made the moral world possible. She slept under a vast expanse by campfire and drank water from tree roots. She learnt the fine art of survival in an arid but spiritual world and how to navigate an environment full of meaning. Tjaruwa paints like she breathes, an almost innate required constant. As she depicts the significant site of Kamanti, she is well aware of the creation manifestation of the Wati Kutjara (Two Men Creation Line) and that these Two Men still reside in the well-formed water cavities that penetrate deep into middle earth. She knows with all her learned experience that these Two Men are to be feared but treated with reverence all the same, for they can travel underground as the enormous water serpents that they are, or walk the landscape in the form of mortal men. And as she sings the sites onto the two dimensional plane, let us appreciate through the panoramic composition that comes from a lifetime of breathing in this country.

Tjaruwa was born in 1954 outside the Spinifex Determination Area at Warutjara, the place of Minyma Tjilkamata - the Echidna Woman, near the current community of Jamieson (Manta Maru) within the Ngaanyatjarra Lands. Except for possession of a few pieces of iron, fashioned into implements and tin bowls Tjaruwa lived traditionally until the winter of 1986 when her family group of seven was located in northern Spinifex by a group of Spinifex people making a sortie into country to re-visit important Men’s sites after some 25 years of absence. Tjaruwa came in with a small son on her hip and camped with her family firstly at Yakatunya, 90 kilometres south of Tjuntjuntjara, joined the moving camp which accompanied the construction of a road, 300 kilometres through the length of the Spinifex Lands, before settling permanently at Tjuntjuntjara in 1989. Tjaruwa was adjudged to be about 32 years old in 1986 and was given the birth date 1/7/1954. At this point in time (2014),Tjaruwa’s family remains the last Aboriginal group in the country to make first contact with contemporary Australia.

It is difficult to even imagine the changes Tjaruwa was to encounter living in her new world. She had acquired an extended network of kin to establish relationships with, the daily activity of hunting and gathering was essentially replaced by the community store and water was abundant.

Tjaruwa’s immediate priority was to care for her mother and uncle living in their new circumstances and it was not until her mother passed away that she took up an interest in painting. At first she tended to paint as she observed other women painting and then the accumulated experience of her other life and her mother’s stories/designs poured out and Tjaruwa’s unique Spinifex perspective was translated with spectacular style and technique on to canvas.

Tjaruwa has painted her homeland of Yampil, an area in northern Spinifex. This is sandhill country, with Spinifex and Mulga trees and very sparse water deposits usually in the form of rockholes, which are quite small or soak water which you have to dig for. To survive in the Western Desert area it is essential to know where to find the water and this knowledge has been passed down over thousands of years from generation to generation. Tjaruwa has painted the rockholes of Kamanti􀆟, Waltjipi, Pur Purnya, Kapi Wiratjara and Tjiwara.

Her artworks are in the following prestigious collections :

Art Gallery Of South Australia, Adelaide Sa (Women’s Collaborative)
National Gallery Of Australia, Canberra
National Gallery Of Victoria, Melbourne Vic (Women’s Collaborative)
Richard And Harriet England Collection
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Usa (Women’s Collaborative)
The British Museum, London, England.(Womens Collaborative)
The Corrigan Collection, Australia
The Lepley Collection, Perth, Western Australia.
The Sims Dickson Collection, Nsw
Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra, Act (Womens Collaborative)
W. & V. Mcgeoch Collection, Melbourne, Vic.
The Berndt Collection, University Of Western Australia.