Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  Jilamara Arts and Crafts, Melville Island, Tiwi Islands
  Purchased from Raft Artspace, Darwin, Northern Territory in March 2002
  The Laverty Collection, Sydney
  
  EXHIBITED:
  Pwoja Jilamara - new works from Jilamara Arts & Crafts, Raft Artspace, Darwin, March 2002, cat. no. 15
  
  This painting is sold with accompanying Jilamara Arts and Crafts documentation.
  
  KITTY KANTILLA
  The 'Queen of Jilamara', as she came to be known,
  is one of the outstanding Tiwi artists of the modern
  period (F. Green in Ryan, J., et al. Kitty Kantilla,
  Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2007, pp.94-
  5). Kitty Kantilla lead a traditional life on Melville
  Island, although for a period in her early days she
  spent time at the Catholic mission on Bathurst Island
  where she was baptised 'Mary Campion.' In the 1970s
  and 1980s she had moved to live at Paru on Melville
  Island, along with a group of elder Tiwi women, to
  distance themselves from European influences. Here she
  produced painted ironwood sculptures using traditional
  techniques, and eventually she moved to Milikapiti
  (Snake Bay) to be closer to her family, where she worked
  through the local art centre, Jilamara Arts. As she
  grew older and less able to cope with the exertions of
  sculpture, she turned to painting on canvas and paper
  where she could explore at length the body painting
  designs which she had applied to her figure sculptures.
  
  Kitty Kantilla's painting career is marked by a
  number of milestones. Her work has been included
  in several major exhibitions in Australia and abroad
  including: Power of the Land, Masterpieces of Aboriginal
  Art, National Gallery of Victoria in 1994; Beyond the
  Pale, Adelaide Biennale, Art Gallery of South Australia
  in 2000; The Dark and the Light at the Sammlung Essl,
  Klosterneuburg, Austria in 2001; in 2002 she won the
  Work on Paper section of the Telstra National Aboriginal
  and Torres Strait Islander Art Award; the Clemenger
  Contemporary Art Award in 2003; and EXPLAINED,
  A closer look at Aboriginal art at the AAMU Aboriginal
  Art Museum, Utrecht, the Netherlands in 2004. The
  culmination of Kantilla's career came posthumously
  when the National Gallery of Victoria mounted a
  major retrospective exhibition of her work in 2007.
  
  Wally Caruana

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Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art

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