Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  Painted in 2009
  Tjungu Palya, South Australia
  Randell Lane Fine Art, Perth
  Superannuation Fund of William Nuttall and Annette Reeves
  
  Maringka Baker is a Pitjantjatjara artist who is a member of the Tjungu Palya group working in the northern reaches of the deserts of South Australia whose art has come to the fore in the last decade. Here artists continue the graphic traditions of the desert that first came to public attention at Papunya in the early 1970s, with their own inflections on the tradition. Their paintings are characterised by the intense use of colour.
  
  The remoteness of the small communities in which Baker has lived has allowed for cultural practices and ceremony to continue practically uninterrupted, despite the dislocation forced upon several desert groups as a result of bomb and rocket testing in the region. This cultural foundation is the basis of the subjects of Maringka Baker's paintings.
  
  Baker is the custodian of several major ancestral stories including Kuru Ala and Kungkarrakalpa, associated with the Seven Sisters Dreaming. Minyma Kutjara relates to the creative journey of two sisters from the south where the desert meets the sea, to their homelands near the modern day community of Docker River in the Northern Territory. The younger sister is wary of travelling over such a long distance, and the trepidation of being lost in such a vast landscape is subtly conveyed in Baker's painting by the icons of the two sisters camping as they travel – the sets of arcs, oval carrying dishes and bars indicating digging sticks – set against an extensive landscape marked by chains of waterholes and other sites.
  
  Maringka Baker's artistic talent in the public domain was recognised by the selection of her work for the first National Indigenous Art Triennial, Culture Warriors, at the National Gallery of Australia in 2007.
  
  Wally Caruana
  
  This painting is sold with accompanying Tjungu Palya documentation.

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Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art

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