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