Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  Painted at Warmun, Turkey Creek, Western Australia
  Purchased from Mary Macha, Perth in May 1994
  The Laverty Collection, Sydney
  
  EXHIBITED:
  Mapping our Countries, Djamu Gallery, Australian Museum at Customs House, Circular Quay, Sydney, 8 October 1999 - 27 March 2000
  True Stories: Art of the East Kimberley, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 11 January - 27 April 2003
  
  LITERATURE:
  Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia's Remote Aboriginal Communities - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2008, pp.210-211 (illus.)
  Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Australian Aboriginal Art - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Edition II, Melbourne: Kleimeyer Industries, 2011, pp.222-3 (illus.)
  
  Paddy Jaminji was the original painter of the panels
  carried in the Kurirr Kurirr ceremony, and with his kin
  nephew Rover Thomas, he was the prime instigator
  of a modern painting movement that emerged in the
  eastern Kimberley in the wake of Cyclone Tracy. His
  role is clearly stated in his own words, recollected by
  Kim Akerman as the title to his essay on the artist in the
  catalogue of Jaminji's survey exhibition at the Holmes à
  Court Gallery in Perth in 2004: '"I Bin Paint'im First":
  Paddy Jaminji - Trailblazing Artist of the Warmun
  School of Aboriginal Art.'
  
  The Kurirr Kurirr is about Cyclone Tracy and the
  destruction of Darwin on Christmas Eve, 1974, by
  Wungurr the ancestral Rainbow Serpent. Over the
  following months, the ceremony had been revealed
  to Rover Thomas by the spirit of a woman who had
  died from injuries incurred in a car accident caused by
  the flooding waters of the cyclone. The woman was
  Jaminji's kin sister and Thomas' aunt; hence Jaminji
  was in the correct complementary kin relationship to
  execute the paintings, as is customary. The first Kurirr
  Kurirr ceremonies occurred in the late 1970s and were
  performed to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences
  alike as a statement of cultural survival after years of
  social disruption for Aboriginal people in the Kimberley.
  
  The first paintings made for sale at Warmun were
  usually connected to the Kurirr Kurirr, but in time
  artists began to paint unrelated subjects. Jaminji was
  particularly intent of preserving Gija culture and
  ancestral knowledge through his art. Painted in 1984,
  Untitled (Men's ceremonial ground, Springvale) is among the
  artist's earliest works that feature a subject unconnected
  to the Kurirr Kurirr, as are several other paintings
  made in the same year in the collection of the National
  Gallery of Australia (see Caruana, W. (ed), Windows on
  the Dreaming: Aboriginal Paintings in the Australian National
  Gallery, Canberra: Australian National Gallery, and
  Sydney: Ellsyd Press, 1989, plates 100-3, pp.173-5).
  
  Jaminji's work has been included in several major
  exhibitions in Australia and abroad, including: Recent
  Aboriginal Art of Western Australia and Aboriginal Art: The
  Continuing Tradition at the National Gallery of Australia
  in 1987 and 1989 respectively; Images of Power, Aboriginal
  Art of the Kimberley, at the National Gallery of Victoria
  in 1993; ARATJARA, Art of the First Australians, at the
  Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf,
  Hayward Gallery, London, and the Louisiana Museum,
  Humlebaek, Denmark in 1993-4; and Power of the Land,
  Masterpieces of Aboriginal Art, at the National Gallery of
  Victoria in 1994.
  
  Wally Caruana

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Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art

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