Charmaine Pwerle | 'Awelye, 2025' | 91x120cm

Code: PPFACP1285

Artist: Charmaine Pwerle

Title: Awelye

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 91x120cm

Year: 2025

Awelye speaks to the body paint designs worn by Anmatyerre and Alyawarre women during women's ceremony. Charmaine Pwerle inherits this subject from a formidable lineage. Her mother is Barbara Weir and her grandmother was the celebrated Minnie Pwerle. The knowledge passes through the women of her family, and the painting carries that weight without ever feeling heavy.

The canvas hums with movement. Concentric circles bloom across the surface in soft whites and dense blacks, some tight and controlled, others loose and swimming. Between them, a webbing of fine linework tracks across the picture plane. These marks echo the lines painted onto women's chests, shoulders and breasts before ceremony. The larger roundels suggest the meeting places and body centres where the designs converge.

Pwerle works in a monochrome palette here, and the restraint is telling. Stripped of colour, the composition reads as pure rhythm. Your eye moves from one orbit to the next, catching on the smaller cellular shapes that fill the ground between. There is a quiet insistence in the repetition. Nothing is identical. Every circle has its own hand, its own pressure, its own wobble.

The work belongs to a broader Utopia region tradition of Awelye painting, made famous by senior women including her grandmother. Charmaine has carved out her own voice within it. Her line is more gestural than Minnie's bold sweeps, more layered, more graphic. The black and white treatment feels contemporary while the subject remains ancestral.

Standing before it, you sense the count of women who have painted these same forms onto skin and canvas. A living inheritance, held in ink and paint.