September 2021

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Compact umbrella featuring Mervyn Rubuntja

This beautiful compact umbrella features the artwork of senior artist Mervyn Rubuntja. The original painting created in 2015 is titled Tjoritja (West MacDonnell Ranges, NT). Painted in a circular format it provides an all-compassing view of Mervyn’s West Aranda country.

Mervyn is the Chairperson of Iltja Ntjarra, the 100% Aboriginal owned and directed art centre supporting landscape painters in Mparntwe (Alice Spring). Iltja Ntjarra has a special focus on supporting the ‘Hermannsburg School’ style watercolour artists, who continue to paint in the tradition of their grandfather and relative, Albert Namatjira, arguably one of Australia’s most famous artists of the 20th century. Albert Namatjira taught his children to follow in his unique style, who have since passed this knowledge on to their children, which has resonated in a legacy of watercolour artists in the Central Desert region. By continuing his legacy, these artists sustain an important piece of living history.

Whilst committed to continuing the Namatjira legacy, the Iltja Ntjarra artists are also brave and adventurous and excited by the possibilities of seeing their works reimagined in different formats and for different purposes. They have undertaken a number of projects to explore these possibilities. Once such project was the development of the Namatjira Collection, a beautiful range of limited editions 1950’s era circle skirts on to which artists’ circular landscape paintings were printed. Mervyn created a number of circular paintings for the project including the painting now reimagined on this umbrella.

Mervyn’s original artwork circular watercolour landscape on paper was first exhibited alongside a circular skirt with his painting digital printed on it in May 2015 at RAFT artspace in Mparntwe (Alice Spring). The collection was then showcased at the Art Gallery of South Australia in late 2015 as part of TARNANTHI: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. The original painting were also transformed into illuminated sculptures for Parrtjima: A Festival of Light in 2016 under the title Inti Ljapa Ljapa Irapakalam, Butterfly going round and round.

Mervyn talks with enthusiasm of reimagining his watercolour painting for the project:

We are excited to go in a bit of different direction, but we still have the landscape paintings in our minds, the way it started.

This umbrella is a further extension of the 2015 project and one that Mervyn is excited to see come to fruition:

I like it because everyone can wear my artwork and show other people. We should do more of that, that’s what I’m thinking.

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MN Hand Screen Printed T-shirt White (Purpl Hemp)

‘Watiya Tjuta’

Napurrula’s father, Tupa Tjakamarra gave her the right to paint works related to Ilyingaungau in the Gibson Desert. This site, south of Walungurru (Kintore), some 520 kilometres west of Mparntwe (Alice Springs), is where the artist’s Mutikatjirri ancestors assembled their kulata (spears) for a conflict with the Tjukula men. Allusive works that refer to the straightening of kulata by Tjupurrula are among the landmark paintings of the Ikuntji Artists movement’s 30-year history.

The paintings of Napurrula and her husband, Long Tom Tjapanangka, have come to be understood as archetypical of Ikuntji art since they began to work with the arts centre in 1993. Napurrula remembers, ‘ … After I got married, my mother taught me my father’s Tjukurrpa in the sand, that’s what I’m painting on the canvas’. The white pigment eddies around abstract forms that refer to the spearwood trees. The tightly structured patterning of the key motifs and bold use of colour demonstrates the artist’s confidence in her individual artistic vision within a family of superlative artists – and the cultural heritage that continues to inform the myriad expressions of Western Desert artists.

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Hand painted seed earrings

Hand painted earrings made with locally collected nuts. Note that earrings will vary in colour and design painted on nut as this item is individually handmade.

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Hand painted seed earrings

Hand painted earrings made with locally collected nuts. Note that earrings will vary in colour and design painted on nut as this item is individually handmade.

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Ben Ward Mens S

In this image senior artist Ben Ward depicts Thompson Springs, located in Yardungall Country (Dingo Springs) in the East Kimberley. Thompson Springs is a site belonging to the Eagle and the White Crane Dreaming. In this particular work a spring is depicted bubbling up between two rock formations. The blue and white triangles towards the top are the sky and clouds. The white triangles are the gum trees, the green the leaves and the yellow the grasses. The red ochre triangles are the rocks, the orange the sand and the blue in the centre is the spring.

100% cotton T-shirt.

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Canning Stock Route

100 piece jigsaw puzzle (210mm x 297mm x 1.5mm jigsaw only, packaged size: 167mm x 125mm x 16mm) supplied in a tin with wraparound sleeve, featuring the collaborative painting ‘Our Country’ by Martumili Artists Kumpaya Girgirba, Kathleen Sorensen, Judith Samson, Sonia Williams, Natasha Williams, Noreena Kadibil, Thelma Judson, Karnu Nancy Taylor, Marjorie Yates, and Noelene Girgirba.

Work on this painting commenced at Parnngurr Community in September 2011. The canvas was rolled out, and Judith Samson under Kumpaya’s instruction painted the road and waterholes. Kumpaya soon jumped in and started painting with Judith, later being  joined by several more artists.The painting was worked on at Parnngurr on and off for two weeks and finally completed by Kumpaya and Kathleen after ten days of nonstop painting to complete the detail.

The painting depicts the Canning Stock Route and the wells along it, more importantly it illustrates the artists intimate knowledge of their country; the use of fire to manage county, vast sand hills and underground water sources, the jukurrpa (dreaming).

“There’s minyi puru (seven sisters) all through this painting, the seven sisters stopped all through this country, at all of the waterholes. The Jina (feet) show where Martu walked in pujiman, all through the desert, we still walk through our country, now there are lots of Toyotas on the CSR, tourists, Martu and the Martu rangers working on the country to look after it. You can see the pattern waru (Fire) makes on country and how much water there is in the desert, Martu know how to find this water, not just the water in CSR wells. Kunawarritji is the big waterhole; it’s my home, its lovely country.”

– Kumpaya Girgaba

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Contact DVD

‘Contact’ is constructed around one of the most extraordinary pieces of footage in Australian history: The moment when a group of Martu women and children walk in from their nomadic existence of millennia in the desert into the universe of European modernity. Remarkably, participants from both the Aboriginal and European sides are alive to tell their story. The film centres on Yuwali, the beautiful 17-year-old girl we see making that giant leap on the 24th of September 1964. Now 62, vibrant and with gorgeous infectious laugh, Yuwali still remembers life before contact, when her tribe flourished in one of the most hostile environments on the planet. Her group of twenty were the last remnant Aboriginal mob still living traditionally, without any contact or knowledge of modern Australia, in the remote Great Sandy Desert. A huge space rocket test–Blue Streak–was to be fired in May 1964 at their home in the Percival Lakes. The authorities sent in patrol officers to evacuate anyone living there to protect them from rocket debris. The days counting down to blast off drive the narrative of the film. Back at the Lakes, Yuwali gives a riveting account as she and her group are chased hundreds of kilometres around the desert trying to escape the ‘devilmen’ in the ‘rocks that move’ (four wheel drives). The climax is both extraordinary and emotional.

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Martumili logo

Tight knit Beanie with embroidered Martumili Artists logo. 

100% acrylic, One size fits all 
Available in Black

The Martumili Artists logo was created in 2006 during a workshop, where artists collectively voted on the final design, incorporating Yunkurra Billy Atkins’ ‘Martumili’ text and Ngamaru Bidu’s painting of warta (trees). ‘Martumili’ translates to owned by the Martu people, signifying the Martu people’s ownership of the paintings, stories, and artist spaces associated with Martumili Artists. 

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Kira Kiro Wet Season by Betty Bundamurra

This 100% cotton T-Shirt design is a reproduction from the painting “Kira Kiro Wet Season”

The Kira Kiro (Gwion or Bradshaw) figures dance to celebrate the wet season. Waterholes fill up,  Yulu—Bush Flowers grow  abundantly,  Langi—Trees grow tall surrounded by pretty  Aru— Rocks.

Betty was born at Karunji station where her father was a stockman. She was born in the bush while her parents were on a walkabout. She came to Kalumburu Mission Convent where she was looked after by Ignatia Ganwalla and the nuns at the age of three, after the death of her mother. She worked in the mission baking bread and the Kalumburu school as a teaching aid. Betty has five children and seven grand children and lives happily with her family in Kalumburu.  She has worked as an arts worker at Kira Kiro Arts Centre since 2009.

 

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