This auction has ended. View lot details
You may also be interested in
Lena Yarinkura(born 1948)Yawkyawk (female water spirit) height: 127.0cm
Sold for AU$221.40 inc. premium
Looking for a similar item?
Our Australian Art specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialistAsk about this lot

Alex Clark
Head of Sale, Senior Specialist

Merryn Schriever
Managing Director, Australia
Lena Yarinkura (born 1948)
pandanus (pandanus spiralis) and natural dyes, filled with dried paperbark
height: 127.0cm
Footnotes
PROVENANCE
Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida, Northern Territory
Aboriginal and Pacific Art, Sydney
The Gillespie Collection, Sydney
RELATED WORKS
Other Yawkyawk figures by the artist are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
'In the late 1980s, Lena Yarinkura began producing near life-size representations of the major ancestral cycles told by the elders of western and central Arnhem Land. To illustrate the stories that belong to her husband and herself, Yarinkura makes paperbark and woven sculptures of a range of spirit figures, dogs, yawkyawk (mermaid-like spirits) and crocodiles. These installations, often decorated with ochre and feathers, have precedents in men's ceremonial objects that have rarely been seen after the 1960s – as well as the small spirit dolls held by women in Mularra ceremonies'
























