Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Painted at Papunya, Northern Territory
Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory
Purchased from Utopia Art Sydney, Sydney in July 1989

EXHIBITED:
On loan to St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, 12 March 2004-2011

Turkey Tolson was one of the youngest members of the
first painting group at Papunya in 1971. For much of
the decade he lived at the outstation of Kungkayurnti
where Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri was one of his main
influences. In fact Namarari had reciprocal rights in
several of the Dreamings owned by Toslon. In 1985 he
assumed the position of chair of the collective, Papunya
Tula Artists, a post he held for ten years. By 1990 he
commenced a series of paintings on the theme of spearmaking
at the site of Ilyingaungau in his traditional
country (see Straightening spears at Ilyingaungau, 1990, in
the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia
in Perkins, H. and H. Fink [eds.], Papunya Tula: Genesis
and Genius, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales in
association with Papunya Tula Artists, 2000, pp.114-5,
illus.). Secret-sacred Men's Ceremonial Dreamings..., 1989, is
a precursor to the Straightening Spears pictures. The
field of strong repeated parallels lines of joined dots owe
much to the influence of Mick Namarari.

Turkey Tolson has been represented in several major
exhibitions in Australia and abroad, including: the
Nigerian Festival Exhibition, Lagos, Nigeria in 1977;
Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art at the Pacific Asia
Museum in Los Angeles in 1981; the seminal exhibition
Koori Art '84, at Art Space, Sydney in 1984; in 1997,
along with Joseph Jurra Tjaparljtarri he installed a sand
painting for the exhibition Peintres Aborigènes d'Australie, at
La Grand Halle de la Villette, Paris; Papunya Tula: Genesis
and Genius, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales,
Sydney in 2000; and Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal
Paintings from Papunya, at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum
of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, Fowler Museum of
Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles,
and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, New
York, in 2009.

Wally Caruna


This painting is sold with an accompanying Papunya Tula Artists certificate.