Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory
Purchased from Raft Artspace, Darwin in September 2006
The Laverty Collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED:
TogArt Contemporary Art Exhibition 2006, Parliament House, Darwin, 18 July - 3 August 2006

LITERATURE:
Felicity Green (ed.), TogArt Contemporary Art Exhibition 2006, exh. cat., Darwin: Top End Arts Marketing, 2006, p.35 (illus.)
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, p.302 (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, p.340 (illus.)

This painting is sold with accompanying Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre documentation.

WUKUN WANAMBI
Wukun Wanambi came to light as an artist in
spectacular fashion when his first ever bark painting
won the 1998 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Art Award in the bark painting division. It had
been included in the first edition of the catalogue of
Saltwater; Yirrkala Bark Paintings of Sea Country, a national
touring exhibition which contributed to the High
Court's decision to recognise Indigenous sea rights
in 2008. As the winning work was acquired by the
Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory
it was replaced in the tour and subsequent editions of
this book with a similar work.

Wukun had been drafted to paint his saltwater country
and was tutored by his cultural managers as
his father, the artist Mithili, died when he was too young
to learn. From 2007 to the present he has been the
cultural manager of The Mulka Project, the digital arm
of the Yirrkala art centre. He was highly commended
in the 2003 NATSIAA and won the three dimensional
category in 2010.

His first memorial poles were included in the Kerry
Stokes Collection Larrakitj which showed at the Sydney
Biennale in 2010. He has had successful exhibitions at
Raft Artspace and Niagara Galleries and been shown
overseas in France, England, Singapore, China and
the United States. He is in many major Australian and
international institutional collections and on permanent
display at the Bennelong restaurant at the Sydney Opera
House and the Musée de Lyon.

Will Stubbs