Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Annandale Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, Switzerland

EXHIBITED
Wamulu, Annandale Galleries, Sydney, 2 March - 2 April 2005

The Wamulu exhibition at Annandale Galleries in 2005 came together as a result of the shared vision between several central desert artists, French artist and collector, Arnaud Serval and Bill Gregory of Annandale Galleries. The Western Desert Art movement of the early 70s had brought about one of the most important developments in Australian art history when artists from several different language groups at Papunya began to record their traditional ceremonial designs on composition board. The objective of Wamulu was to recreate on large boards the ceremonial ground 'paintings' that had preceded this movement that were traditionally laid out for ceremony and destroyed shortly after. These designs were also applied to the bodies of the dancers as well as to ceremonial objects, and represent the stories, travels and locations of the Ancestral beings from creation times.

In 2004, Serval, who had spent many years sharing his time between Alice Springs and Paris, conceived the initial ideas for the Wamulu works with the central desert artists. Having used unconventional materials in his own practice such as feathers, tar, sand and wood he was convinced that the ground paintings could be affixed to boards in order to be able to exhibit them. Later that year, Gregory was to visit Alice Springs and was so inspired by this innovative project that preparation for the 2005 exhibition began right away. The result was a remarkable body of work by Ted Egan Tjangala, Johnny Possum Tjapaltjari, Albie Morris Tjampitjinpa and Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa. As Bill Gregory describes in the accompanying exhibition catalogue: 'The texture of wamulu has its own unique aesthetic. It creates a surface that is felt as much as it is seen, adding both bulk and lightness to the surface, creating forms that are almost equally two - and three - dimensional. The medium itself is seen to embody the potency of the ancestral beings'.

Reference: Wamulu exhibition catalogue, Annandale Galleries, Sydney, 2005