Details of At Wallaby Beach

Catalog Number : 26151
Size : 41cm x 114cm
Medium : natural earth pigment on bark
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Nyapanyapa's work has been more valued for the spontanaeity and texture of her hand. She expresses her capacity to live in the moment in the freeness of her mark making. There is no calculation or even regard for the audience in her renditions. Their final appearance is almost random. They are an expression of the movements of her hand as they happen to have taken place on that particular day.

In early 2008 she made a dramatic departure from the previous conventions of Yolgnu art.

The grammatic tense which Yolngu sing/paint/discuss the creatin forces that shape their world is unknown to non-indigenous. Sometimes simplified as "Dreamtime" in English it conveys a temporal union between prehistory, the present and the distant future. All of these time zones are happening simultaneously. This is the tense in which the creaion events happened/are happening/will happen. All Yolgnu art until this point was either sacred and in this tense or decorative. Decorative paintingswere expressly 'ordinary' and without meaning or story of any kind.

But once prompted to treat the story of her almost fatal goring by a buffalo in the seventies Nyapanyapa threw these conventions over and unleashed a unique set of personal narrative paintings revolving around her own experiences. This subjective, individualistic and linear narrative construction was totally out of step with all previous Yolngu art. The first of these was so suprising that it was entered in the 2008 Telstra NATSIAA Award. To bolster the chances of preselection an explanatory video was produced by the newly founded digital archive and studio attached to Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, the Milka Project. As it happened the video was completed after the bark had been accepted but the entry was varied to include the bark and video as a 3D installation. Another first!

In the midst of this evolving story a visit from Roslyn Oxley planted the seed of a potential Nyapanyapa exhibition and throughout the first half of 2008 Nyapanyapa often accompanied by her sister Barrupu painted a succession of almost twenty narrative barks in the bourtyard of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre. Her labours were so regular that they were only interuppted by ceremony.

This work shows the artist at her new residence of Wallaby Beack, land belonging to the Gumatj. It was here that the original camp for construction workers who arrived here in the early seventies, after the failed first land rights caase hear in this country, to build the huge industrial processing pland and mining town. Later Wallaby Beach became the much sought after prime residential real-estate for mining families wanting to live right on the beach. In 2009 with government invervention and broader shire take-overs, the mine relinquised its hold on this small residential estate and Indigenous enterprise was able to lease it from the government, who in turn rent the old houses back to the Yolngu.

This painting depicts her with fish and oyster covered rocks and the often painted signature, a native apple tree.