Charmaine Pwerle | 'Awelye,2023' | 60x60cm

Code: CHAPW0503

Artist: Charmaine Pwerle

Title: Awelye

Area: Utopia (Urapuntja), NT

Community: Anmatyerre / Alyawarre

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 60x60cm

Year: 2023

Charmaine Pwerle's Awelye paintings return again and again to the ceremonial body paint designs of Atnwengerrp, her grandmother's country. These are the marks senior women applied to the breast, shoulders and upper arms in ceremony, the sweeping bands and circular sites carried into paint after she returned to Utopia in the early 1990s and was given this knowledge by the women around her. The designs record more than pattern: they hold the sites where ceremony was held and the tracks walked in search of bush foods across the sandhills of her country.

Charmaine Pwerle was born in Alice Springs in 1975 and raised on the Utopia homelands in the Northern Territory, within one of the most significant artistic families in Australian art. She is the daughter of the late Barbara Weir and the granddaughter of the late Minnie Pwerle, and grew up in the company of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Gloria Petyarre and the Pwerle sisters. Educated in Adelaide and later living in Melbourne, she returned to Utopia in 1992, a period in which senior women passed on the ceremonial knowledge that underpins her painting. Her practice centres on Awelye, the women's ceremonial body paint designs of her grandmother's country, Atnwengerrp. Sweeping curvilinear bands describe the marks applied to the breast, shoulders and upper arms during ceremony, while circular forms denote ceremonial sites and linear tracks record the routes women travelled in search of bush foods. Working in acrylic on linen, she paints with a confident, unhesitating line inherited from her grandmother, but in a palette and rhythm distinctly her own, ranging from restrained monochromes to saturated multi-colour fields. Her work has been shown throughout Australia and in the United Kingdom and Europe, and she continues to paint from Alice Springs.