Provenance
Field Collected by Paul Walsh, NT Cat. No. 120395WT
Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 4097
Hank Ebes Collection, Vic
accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings
Story
Willy Tjungurrayi grew up in the bush living a traditional life and was brought with his family to Haasts Bluff in the late 1950s when he was a young man. He moved to Papunya where he started painting for Papunya Tula Artists in 1976. In the 1980s he emerged as one of the senior Pintupi painters along with his younger brother Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungarrayi, and older brother George Tjungurrayi.
The Tingari Cycle is a secret song cycle sacred to initiated men. The Tingari are Dreamtime beings who travelled across the landscape performing ceremonies to create and shape the country associated with Dreaming sites. The Tingari ancestors gathered at these sites for Maliera (initiation) ceremonies. The sites take the form of, and are located at, significant rockholes, sand hills, sacred mountains and water soakages in the Western Desert. Tingari may be poetically interpreted as song-line paintings relating to the songs (of the people) and creation stories (of places) in Pintupi mythology.
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