Minnie Pwerle | 'Awelye, 2005' | 90x120cm

Code: PPFAMP935

Artist: Minnie Pwerle

Title: Awelye

Area: Utopia, NT

Community: Alyawerre

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 90x120cm

Year: 2005

Minnie Pwerle's Awelye paintings translate the ceremonial body paint designs worn by Alyawerre women onto canvas, a body of work she pioneered late in her life. These lines are the marks traditionally drawn across the chest, breasts and arms during women's ceremony at Utopia, and in her hands the designs became something new: loose, urgent, and entirely her own gesture rather than a copy of any fixed pattern.

Across a black ground Minnie lays down three broad horizontal bands of colour, each built from close-set vertical strokes that loop and double back on themselves like linked body markings. The top band runs in warm cream, gold and mustard, threaded through with a run of hot pink and red near its centre. A wide central band in rust brown dominates the canvas, the strokes here denser and more insistent, curling into loose ring shapes where the brush has swept back on itself. A third band along the bottom repeats the cream and gold of the top in a looser, more open rhythm, punctuated by strokes of orange.

The paint is applied thickly and fast, each vertical mark a single loaded pass of the brush, uneven in width and length, some breaking off short and others running long and curved. Nothing is measured or repeated identically; the energy of the hand is visible in every stroke. The black ground shows through constantly between the marks, giving the whole surface a flickering, unstable quality rather than a solid field of colour.

Seen from across a room the three bands read as a single rolling movement, brown at the centre pressing against the lighter registers above and below, the black ground holding it all together like night pressing in from every side. Up close the painting dissolves into hundreds of individual, unrepeatable gestures, the raw physical record of the brush moving across canvas.

Minnie Pwerle was a senior Alyawerre artist from Utopia in the Northern Territory who did not begin painting until her eighties, yet became one of the most recognised figures in Aboriginal art through her Awelye works based on women's ceremonial body designs. Her marks are bold, gestural and unmistakably her own, and she remains highly sought after in major collections and at auction. She was the mother of artist Barbara Weir.

Minnie Pwerle (c. 1910–2006) was a senior Alyawerre artist who pioneered the Awelye (body paint) style on canvas. Beginning to paint in her eighties, she created bold, gestural works based on women's ceremonial body designs. Her raw, energetic marks became one of the most iconic expressions in Aboriginal art. Mother of Barbara Weir.