Gulumbu Yunupingu

Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory
Collection of Dennis and Debra Scholl, Miami, USA

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, pp.144-145 (illus.).

The human condition is at the core of Gulumbu Yunupingu’s paintings, expressed through a metaphor of the constellations of the night sky. Gulumbu was taught to paint on sheets of eucalyptus bark by her father Munggurrawuy Yunupingu (c.1905-1979), a renowned clan leader, an advocate for his people – the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land – in the face of foreign intrusion, and an exceptionally gifted artist. Well versed in the Yolngu styles of bark painting that incorporate detailed clan patterns, geometric compositional structures and figurative representations, in 1999 Gulumbu Yunupingu embarked on a series of paintings that depicted ganyu, the constellations of stars in the night sky. These and subsequent paintings relate to ancestral chronicles about the constellations: one about the Seven Sisters who went about in their canoe collecting food; and another about Two Sisters, Gudhaykudhay and Nhayay in dispute over the Possum Man. In these works, however, narrative and conventional compositional structures give way to emotions where the paintings encompass a more universal theme ‘focused on the primary metaphysical idea of the unity of people within the cosmos’.[1]

Wally Caruana

1. Howard Morphy in Brody, A.M. et al, Larrakitj: Kerry Stokes Collection, Australian Capital Equity, Perth, 2011, p.180.