Queen of the Desert
A serene retrospective confirms
tribal elder Kathleen Petyarre as a painter of transcendence
By
MICHAEL FITZGERALD
Me kweyetwemp,
bush name," says Kathleen Petyarre. Surveying the 60 works
that comprise her retrospective at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary
Art, the quiet, dignified Anmatyerr elder from Mosquito Bore,
300 km northeast of Alice Springs, reverts to a skittish giggle
as she recalls the body-painting ceremonies of her childhood.
As a young girl, Petyarre had to stand at the back of the
queue as the senior women danced in celebration of the yam
harvest. "Her grandmother chose her to be special to learn
about the law," explains Christine Nicholls, lecturer in cultural
studies at Adelaide's Flinders University. Today, painting
"is a different way of being special."
And special
Petyarre is. Having survived controversy (a former de facto
husband's claim that he painted her 1996 National Aboriginal
& Torres Strait Islander Art Awardwinning Storm in Atnangker
Country II was dismissed by a museum board inquiry in 1998),
Petyarre has emerged as the leading artist of the renowned
Utopia art movement, and heir to the late, great Emily Kame
Kngwarreye, her aunt. To stroll the MCA's fourth-level galleries,
from Petyarre's rough-and-ready batiks of the late '70s to
her recent and sublime color-field canvases, is to witness
the spinning of indigenous knowledge into fine-art gold. With
"Genius of Place," which runs through July 22, it's doubtful
the visitor will see a more beautiful, transcendent show this
year. "There is something very centered and very sure and
very serene about the place that she takes you to with her
work," says the MCA's Russell Storer, who curated the exhibition
with Nicholls.
Petyarre
(who guesses she is just over 60) is a cultural navigator,
and the place she knows is her Atnangker country. As Nicholls
writes in a monograph that accompanies the show, Petyarre's
paintings are "mental maps" of the ancestral lands she traveled
as a child with her extended family: her grandparents, her
father and his three wives, her seven sisters and three brothers.
After laboring for nearby pastoralists, the family eventually
moved to the government settlement of Utopia, where Petyarre
worked for 20 years as a teaching assistant at the local school.
During this time, she became active in a land claim which
saw much of Utopia returned to its traditional owners in 1980.
All the
while, a sense of spiritual ownership survived through the
Dreaming stories Petyarre enacted through body painting and
later batik, which was introduced to Utopia in 1977-"the creative
link between the traditional and the contemporary," wrote
initiator Jenny Green. Allergic to the smell and smoke of
batik wax, Petyarre became one of the first local women to
turn to acrylic on canvas when art adviser Rodney Gooch introduced
the materials in 1986. The brilliant stippling that would
become a hallmark of the Utopia style was in part a reaction
against the more explicit religious works painted by the men
of nearby Papunya a decade before. "The dotting is actually
overlaying sacred areas, protecting them from the predatory
gaze," says Nicholls.
What distinguishes
Petyarre's work from the shimmering surfaces of Kngwarreye
is the pathway it offers through the dots. With the scale
and minimalist grace of a Rothko, her paintings invite the
viewer to step into the Atnangker landscape. For travelers
at the MCA, Petyarre's Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming, 1997,
is key. Bearing the cross motif that is pared back in much
of her other work, it is a road map of her land, with four
Dreaming tracks converging in a ceremonial square, where secret
men's and women's business takes place. Shaded in gray toward
the bottom left of the picture are the watercourses and rockholes
that Petyarre brings alive in a series of works housed in
an adjacent room. Mysterious firmaments of olive green and
celestial blue, they give the feeling of entering a darkened
crypt.
The exhibition's
final room offers a more visceral experience of the landscape.
With subtle shifts of the horizon line, Petyarre's dotted
fields of ocher-red and hailstorm-white conjure up the sensation
a passenger might feel in a light plane swooping in to land.
Housed along four walls, they create an effect of spiritual
uplift and endlessly eddying space. And infusing much of the
work-suggested by a circular dance of footprints here, a cloud
of dust there-is the ephemeral presence of Petyarre's custodial
totem, the thorny or mountain devil lizard, arnkerrth-a tiny,
miraculous creature adept at the art of camouflage and survival.
Not unlike
the artist herself. The memory of Welsh-born Ray Beamish's
allegations over Storm in Atnangker Country II still pains
Petyarre, for whom English is a tentative second language.
When asked about the controversy, she drops her head in silence.
(While Petyarre acknowledged that Beamish had assisted her
with the work, she successfully proved custodial and artistic
ownership of the image.) "It was heartbreaking," recalls her
Adelaide dealer, David Cossey. "It was like saying, ŒYou're
not a real person.'"
Three years
later, Petyarre-who divides her time between Adelaide (where
she paints) and Mosquito Bore (where her only child Margaret
Pwerle and pet dogs reside) -is indefatigable. "Soon as I
get up, I start work," she says. "Sometimes I go shopping,
then come back and start again doing painting, yeah. I just
keep on." To achieve her microfine mist of dots, Petyarre
uses the sharpened ends of satay sticks, purchased in bulk
from Indonesia ("Many bamboo forests have been felled," jokes
Nicholls). A large work can take up to six weeks. "I paint
slow," she explains. "Not quick one."
One of the
first paintings Petyarre completed after her annus horribilis
was the magisterial My Country (Bush Seeds), 1999. Now in
the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, it depicts
the greening of the desert as the bush seeds come into flower
before being collected, ground and baked into cakes by the
women of Utopia. Petyarre's art, too, seems born of the land.
Fertilized over a lifetime, it's now reaping its own extraordinary
harvest.
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May 21, 2001 | No. 20
COVER
STORIES
Justice
Delayed
Does the hitch in Timothy McVeigh's execution point to deeper fbi problems?
The confessed bomber may get what he is due in the end, but he may also
have met one of his goals: making Americans doubt the way their government
pursues justice
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
SOUTH
PACIFIC
NEW ZEALAND: Loved to Death...
A top tourist spot's popularity has become a threat to its beauty
Defense: The focus shifts from force
to service
THE
ARTS
ART: Kathleen Petyarre's Utopia Dreamings
BOOKS: A Harry Potter wannabe cries foul
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