Charmaine Pwerle | 'Awelye, 2025' | 91x120cm

Code: PPFACP1205

Artist: Charmaine Pwerle

Title: Awelye

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 91x120cm

Year: 2025

Charmaine Pwerle paints Awelye, the women's body paint designs of her Country. The word names the ochre marks worn across the chest and shoulders by women during ceremony. It also names the songs and dances that accompany them.

Here the canvas reads like a worked surface of memory. Concentric circles bloom across the field. Some are small and tight, others swing wide and loose. They sit among a dense weave of linework, hatching and broken loops that recall the rhythm of brushes drawn across skin.

The palette is held to black and white with washes of grey. Stripped of colour, the painting leans on mark and movement. You can feel the hand behind every stroke. Quick repetitions. Patient circles. Lines laid down and then crossed again.

The circles speak of gathering places and the women who sit around them. The hatched bands echo the painted lines that follow the curve of a body. Read across the whole surface, the work becomes a map of women's business, layered and worked over time.

Charmaine carries a strong inheritance through her mother and grandmother, both senior painters of the Utopia region. Her practice continues that line while finding its own voice. The looseness of her drawing, the confidence of the larger roundels, the willingness to let the ground show through, all belong to her.

This is a generous, energetic canvas. It rewards slow looking. The longer you sit with it, the more the song underneath begins to surface.