Minnie Pwerle | 'Awelye Atnwengerrp Triptych, 2004' | 114x150cm

Code: PPFAMP834

Artist: Minnie Pwerle

Title: Awelye Atnwengerrp Triptych

Area: Utopia, NT

Community: Anmatyerre / Alyawarre

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 114x150cm overall – triptych of three panels: 33x150cm, 48x150cm, 33x150cm

Year: 2004

Awelye Atnwengerrp is a triptych, painted across three tall panels, a broad 48 cm centre flanked by two 33 cm wings, each 150 cm high, so that the ceremonial lines run unbroken from one panel into the next. The title names both the ceremony and the Country it belongs to. Atnwengerrp is Minnie Pwerle's own Country in the Utopia region, and the women's ceremonies held there, Awelye, are where its designs are painted onto the chest, breasts and upper arms and then danced across the ground. The designs hold the law of that place: the songs, the dancing tracks, and the knowledge of where bush melon, bush tomato and wild orange grow. It was a subject she returned to throughout her painting life, and a work under this title was selected for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2003. Here, painted in 2004, the long wavering bands are not illustrated from memory so much as performed again, each one made with the same sweeping motion of the hand that follows the curve of a shoulder in ceremony.

Minnie Pwerle (c. 1910–2006) was a senior Anmatyerre and Alyawarre woman from Atnwengerrp, in the Utopia region about 300 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs. Although the women of Utopia had been making batik and paintings for two decades, she did not pick up a brush until 1999 or 2000, when she was close to eighty; asked why she had waited so long, she said simply that no one had asked her. Her first solo exhibition followed at Flinders Lane Gallery in Melbourne in 2000, and within a few years she had been selected for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award and named among Australian Art Collector's fifty most collectable artists. Painting with a loose, unhesitating hand and a fearless sense of colour, she drew on the Awelye of her Country, the women's ceremonial designs of Atnwengerrp, and on the bush foods it sustains, among them bush melon and bush tomato. She continued to paint until two days before her death in March 2006. Her work is held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Queensland Art Gallery, and her daughter Barbara Weir and her sisters Emily, Galya and Molly Pwerle are also celebrated painters.