Originally appeared in Antiques & Art in Victoria December 2002- April 2003
In the last year or so, a new name has come to the attention of aficionados of Aboriginal art – Minnie Pwerle. An Anmatyerre/Alyawarre artist hailing from the now famous Central Desert area of Utopia, this artist has become something of a ‘known secret in the Aboriginal art world.’[i] With her rising popularity, collectability, her age (around 80 years) and her work itself, which is based on women’s body paint designs, come the inevitable comparisons to that other great dame of the bush, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye who was an Eastern Anmatyerre woman.
These two artists share certain similarities. Yet one could argue that they are also distinct artists in their own right, and that much of these similarities are more a result of their shared culture and family relationship than anything else. What is certain, however, is that Minnie is as close to ‘another Emily’ as we are ever going to get,[ii] now that Kngwarreye has passed away.
The similarities between these two artists are important. Firstly, they are relatives. Kngwarreye was Minnie’s cousin through marriage (in the Aboriginal classificatory sense, her sister), and they shared many aspects of ceremonial life at Utopia. Present in both their works is the dominance of ‘bush tucker’ as subject matter, whether it is the bush melon of Minnie’s work or the different kinds of yams in Emily’s. These plants find their expression in the special body paint designs which women paint on the breasts and upper arms for Awelye, or women’s ceremonies. They are totemic design related to the creation of each woman’s ‘country’, or inherited area of land: land that has been passed down through generations of Anmatyerre/Alyawarre people for thousands of years.
These artists are remembering the spirits of the ancestors who created this land, the songlines they travelled as they created, and the sacred places where they rested or gathered. Each artist’s country is of the utmost importance to her. It is her spiritual and social identity. It is the essence of who she is.
The major difference between Emily and Minnie is that they did not share the same country. Emily was ‘boss woman’ for Alhalkere, her country that was celebrated in her retrospective exhibition, so much so that the curator gave it as the exhibition’s title. Yet, Alhalkere is not the only area at Utopia that has been celebrated in paint. One must remember that there are five land-holding clans on Utopia.
Minnie’s country is Atnwengerrp, where the once abundant bush melon (a sweet fruit) grows. Minnie only paints three subjects. Her Awelye-Atnwengerrp is a series of bold lines painted against a black or coloured background. These are the works which are most similar to Emily’s, particularly her body paint works such as the Utopia panels; they also recall artists such as Tony Tuckson. Bush Melon works involve circles depicting the fruit and breast paint designs belonging to the Pwerle skin group, and lastly Bush Melon Seed, which incorporates smaller roundels of colour.
Emily, on the other hand, had about nine dreamings, as expressed in her famous ‘whole lot’ statement,[iii] although they are all simply aspects as Christopher Hodges has noted, of her country.[iv] In an Aboriginal art market with its demand for explanatory ‘stories’ for non-Indigenous people to ‘understand’ the art, she never ‘gave story’ (see Judith Ryan’s essay in the Alhalkere catalogue). She is, in this regard, a thorough post-modernist, refusing to give ‘explanations’ for her work: rather she always claimed that they were simply about ‘her country’. In this regard Emily is now seen as one of our finest landscape painters.
| Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Kam Kngwarray), Big Yam Dreaming, 1995, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 291.1 x 801.8 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne © Emily Kame Kngwarreye. |
| Minnie Pwerle, Awelye – Women’s Ceremony, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 152.5 x 125 cm. |
Minnie is similar. To her, her paintings are Awelye, ceremonial designs that cover every aspect of the connection to her land. She, too, has an independent spirit and has never made a coolamon or a clapstick, has never painted typical ‘Aboriginal style’ paintings with U-shapes representing women or the more recognisable Aboriginal iconography. She, like Emily, has stuck to her own expression, no matter what those around her may think of it.
Minnie’s paintings can almost be seen as a continuation of Emily’s work, in terms of her brilliance as an artist. They have taken abstract art to a new level. We are not only seeing the land of the painter expressed through a symbolic, totemic design – a process by which we could be seen to be undergoing a shifting of perspective – a different way of seeing art,[v] – we are viewing the work of a great modern artist who is breaking ground in Australian painting.In much the same way that it has been noted that Emily ‘had solved all the problems of Impressionism and captured the essence of pure sensation in a way that Monet, on his own admission, had struggled to achieve throughout his career’[vi] Minnie is continuing (without being aware of it in a theoretical sense) the work of such Australian abstractionists as Tony Tuckson and Ian Fairweather. Their work was, of course, influenced by Aboriginal art.
And just as Emily has been compared to the New York school of Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, whose work was influenced by Navajo sand paintings, Minnie’s art will no doubt be compared to these Australian abstract painters. Compare, for example, Tony Tuckson’s work White Lines (horizontal on red) reproduced in the Alhalkere catalogue, and now hanging in the Indigenous art gallery at the National Gallery of Victoria, to one of Minnie Pwerle’s reductionist line work paintings.
| Tony Tuckson, White Lines (Horizontal) on Red, 1970-73, synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 182.8 x 137.4 cm, Collection National Gallery of Victoria. |
| Minnie Pwerle, Awelye Atnwengerrp, 2002, acrylic on linen, 120 x 90 cm. DACOU Aboriginal Art Melbourne/Flinders Lane Gallery. Private Collection. |
Although Emily had never seen the work of the Abstract Expressionists, and Minnie had never seen the work of Tony Tuckson, it should be noted how much of the greatest contemporary art is working in a cyclical way, from Indigenous to non-Indigenous artists, back and round again. This is the greatest expression of reconciliation. It can only be a result of the collective unconscious. These designs are universal and non-Indigenous people have lost them. It is only our artists who can tap into the primordial in order to regain them.
The paintings of Minnie Pwerle ‘have a quality all of their own.’[vii] One thing that differentiates her immediately from Emily is that she has never painted a dot in her life, while Emily was famous for her large dotted canvases. In fact, half of the paintings in Emily’s retrospective involved dots, whether they are in the foreground or background. Minnie’s works are comprised purely of line and colour. Her palette, too, differs from Emily’s. Most of Emily’s works were comprised of soft yellows, pinks and oranges, with others with green, maroon and violets. Minnie’s is in some ways a stronger palette of reds, ultramarine and indigo blues, bright oranges, bright yellow, and lots of white on black. She is less inclined to blend the paint than Emily was, less inclined to diffuse it with light and more inclined to work with a starker, bolder palette.
Yet the similarity between these artists lies in the sense of energy in their paintings – a bold, powerful force which ‘gives these canvases a noticeable spontaneity and vibrancy.[viiii] Also their highly sophisticated level of abstraction, their love of land and their ‘lack of concern for precision,’ as Margo Neale has noted,[ix] is comparable. Noting Emily’s painting methods, Neale state that she ‘would almost attack the canvas – robustly, assertively. Her dots and lines weave in and under, stop and start, and appear to follow no rules. They are radical and aberrant works and the more I see of them the more I feel both emotionally and physically affected.’[x]
The same could be said for Minnie. Her works have a physical, emotional, and even spiritual impact on the viewer that takes your breath away. Unlike much of Emily’s work, which was imbued with a kind of quiet, impressionistic sense of calm, Minnie’s work seems to be coming straight out of the women’s ceremonies, with little regard for white convention. One can almost see the women dancing in a line, celebrating the secret-sacred aspects of life, the special ‘women’s business’, the fertility rites, the rites of passage from mother to daughter to granddaughter, which have been carried out for so long. The celebration of the spirit that lives in the land, the people, the animals, and most importantly, the plants, which bring survival in the form of food and medicine when times are tough is evident.
All of these aspects exist in Minnie’s work, and yet it seems so fresh, so modern, that one can only be amazed at the talent of this octogenarian painter.
[i] Susan McCulloch-Uehlin, ‘Minnie Pwerle: Bush Melon Stories’, Australian Art Collector, Issue 22, October-December 2002.
[ii] Although I believe this is true, I wish to point out that Kngwarreye was a highly individual artist, who was as famous for the uniqueness of her art in a world too often dominated by ‘sameness’, as she was for her art’s modern abstract qualities, or for her elderliness.
[iii] Emily’s most definitive statement about her subject matter has been over-quoted, in the absence of other definitions: ‘Whole lot, that’s a whole lot. Awelye, Arltyeye (pencil yam), Ankerrthe (mountain devil lizard), Ntange (grass seed), Tingu (a Dreamtime pup), Ankerre (emu), Intekwe (a favourite food of emus, a small plant) Atnwerle (green bean) and Kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint: whole lot…’ (from the Alhalkere catalogue, ed. by Margo Neale, Queensland Art Gallery, 1998.
[iv] ‘Alhalkere was her only subject…by articulating this list, Kngwarreye gives names to component parts. She does not allude to the complex inter-relationships between the elements. ‘Whole lot’ means what it says, her paintings are about the whole, the body of knowledge rather than its unique parts.’ Christopher Hodges, Alhalkere, p.33.
[v] Australian literary critics have talked about the ‘Aboriginalisation’ of contemporary Australian society, wherein the younger non-indigenous generations are learning about Aboriginal culture, while their parents and grandparents never did, imbuing them with a respect for and appreciation of this culture and the land on which they now live (see David Tacey’s book, The Edge of the Sacred). This produces a new way of seeing, in much the same way that the study of Aboriginal art can bring about a new way of seeing art in general.
[vi] Eric Whitley, quote in Margo Neale, Alhalkere, p.29.
[vii] Susan McCulloch-Uehlin, Australian Art Collector, issue 22.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Margo Neale, quoted in S. McCulloch, The Australian Magazine, 14 February 1998.
[x] Ibid.