Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  Painted in 2005
  Warmun Art Centre, Warmun, Western Australia
  Raft Art Space, Alice Springs
  Private collection
  
  EXHIBITED:
  Groundwork: Janangoo Butcher Cherel, Mick Jawalji and Rammey Ramsey, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 30 July - 23 October 2011, cat. no.15
  
  LITERATURE:
  Quentin Sprague (ed.), Groundwork: Janangoo Butcher Cherel, Mick Jawalji and Rammey Ramsey, Melbourne: Ian Potter Museum of Art, 2011, p.34, cat.no.15
  
  According to the accompanying documentation Mawunayin/ Dawyan Dawyan depicts the story of Jawurranji, the Moon and Daawul, the black-headed python. Jawurranji was offered a group of women from the Nyawana skin group as his promised wives, but he refused them all. Instead, he desired Daawul from the Nambin skin group which made her his mother-in-law and was a strictly forbidden union. As punishment for preventing his marriage to Daawul, Jawurranji made the law that death for mortals was final whereas the Moon would die and come back to life each night.
  
  This work on board by the artist was one of two large examples selected for the important 2011 exhibition, Groundwork: Janangoo Butcher Cherel, Mick Jawalji and Rammey Ramsey at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne. Typically, Jawalji has created a frame of painted geometric shapes in darker tones. As Patrick Hutchings describes, "These rectangular works are like windows...What happens in these windows is extremely careful, slow painting, whose thin, dry texture is as engaging as is any high impasto. The feel is rather of watercolour than oil or acrylic. There is a kind of thin richness here. And one almost senses with one's eyes the stiff plywood under the delicate membrane of paint. Firmness and a rice-paper lightness conspire to give these works a special tone" (Patrick Hutchings, "A Window to the Language of the Land", The Age newspaper, October 2005).
  
  This painting is sold with accompanying Warmun Art centre documentation

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Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art

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