Angelina Pwerle

Painted in 2006 in Ngkawenyerre, Utopia, Northern Territory

Niagara Galleries, Melbourne

Collection of Dennis and Debra Scholl, Miami, USA

Angelina Pwerle’s ancestors have lived on Ahalpere, about 300km northeast of Alice Springs, for millennia. She is fortunate to still be living close to her traditional country, maintaining a long commitment to representing it. Ahalpere is the main determining force in Pwerle’s life. At the heart of her social, cultural and ceremonial worlds is the ancestral narrative, Ahalpere Bush Plum Dreaming. Given agency in awelye (woman’s ceremony), Pwerle paints the life cycle of the bush plum, its Dreaming origins and where to find it.

This work represents Pwerle’s distinctive two-colour palette works for Niagara Galleries, using the smallest dot-prints in desert art, on a dramatic black or red primed canvas. Her minimalist approach, conceptualising the white flowers of the Bush Plum, are made with the deft manipulation of a satay stick. Such is the complexity of these large commissions, Pwerle travels into Alice Springs to paint and may only complete one or two major works in a year.

“Angelina Pwerle’s paintings so effectively create an impression of a mysterious and distant place that they are often thought to represent galaxies in the night sky – rather than the terrestrial world that is their subject. These Bush Plum works are, in fact, paintings of the artist’s country: sensate abstractions of her patrilineal clan estate, Ahalpere, in the desert northeast of Alice Springs. This is Anmatyerre country, where the Bush Plum ancestor, an important progenitor from the Altyerre (Dreaming), is a powerful presence in the land. The creative power of this Altyerre is immanent in arnwekety, or Bush Plum (Carissa lanceolata). There are other species of Bush Plum in the desert but it is arnwekety that belongs to Ahalpere, flourishing there as it does in Angelina Pwerle’s paintings.” (Anne Marie Brody in Henry F. Skerritt (ed.), Marking the infinite : Contemporary women artists from Aboriginal Australia : from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, Reno, NV : Nevada Museum of Art ; Munich : DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2016, p.76)