UTOPIA - IN DETAIL

"The former Utopia cattle station in Central Australia, is home to many small Anmatyerr and Alyawarr family groups living in an 1800 square kilometre section of Central Australian desert transected by the largely dry Sandover River. In this extreme desert climate, a Westerner might imagine it as far from perfect. Yet, to the Aboriginal painters who work here, nestled in small outstations close to their ancestral land, the region’s history of violent conflict and dispossession is of little consequence.

Here, the summer heat often exceeds forty degrees Celsius. In winter the nights are cold, with sub-zero and frosts between June and August. But following infrequent rain, the desert landscape is transformed. The dried-out Spinifex flowers resemble a field of wheat, and the mulga shrub bears green dense foliage and masses of bright yellow flowers. Growing amongst these plants is an abundance of wildflowers that turn the deep red desert floor into a utopian multicoloured garden.

In this environment paintings of ‘country’ become contemporary dialogues, translations of ancient laws, culture and way of life. Individual in creation, they depict shared stories and country. They arise through their shared cultural heritage depicting the food, the flora and the Dreamings that traverse this vast and ancient landscape.

Many of these paintings can be read and appreciated at a superficial level for their abstractionism, but the deeper layer which involves the cultural and social mores, requires intimate knowledge to be fully appreciated. These paintings are a contemporary expression of the cultural knowledge an artist holds about their country. Topography depicted through such subtleties as direction and size, the sun’s trajectory, or the details of the artist’s relationship to her sister, cousins, uncles, and aunts are all translated through the medium of acrylic paint.

The driving motivation seems totally divorced from the final aesthetic produced through their labours. A reference back to country is proffered upon every stroke. In this context, seeds, tracks, rocks, rivers, eggs, and so much more are part of the pictorial language of her their Dreaming story, be it the life cycle of a plant such as the Bush Plum, or animal like the Bush Turkey.  Traces of their movement creep across the canvas and are buried beneath successive layers semi-transparent layers of diluted medium. This is a ‘Utopian’ vision, that colours these artists’ reading of their surrounding homelands."