Charmaine Pwerle | 'Awelye, 2025' | 91x120cm
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Code: PPFACP1205
Artist: Charmaine Pwerle
Title: Awelye
Area: Utopia (Urapuntja), NT
Community: Anmatyerre / Alyawarre
Medium: Acrylic On Linen
Size: 91x120cm
Year: 2025
Charmaine Pwerle's Awelye paintings return, canvas after canvas, to the ceremonial body paint of her grandmother's country, Atnwengerrp, in the Anmatyerre and Alyawarre lands of Utopia. Awelye is the name given both to women's ceremony and to the sweeping designs painted onto the breast, shoulders and upper arms during that ceremony, marks that affirm kinship, land and the knowledge women carry of bush food and bush medicine. Pwerle paints the rhythm of ceremony rather than illustrating it literally, her circles marking ceremonial sites, her lines tracing the paths women walked between them.
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.