GRACIE NUNGARRAYI JURRAH - My Country

ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
89CM X 148CM
GRACIE HAS SIGNED THE PAINTING ON THE BACK & A PHOTO OF THE ARTIST HOLDING THE PAINTING IS PROVIDED.
REF#GJ521

Born: Kintore, Northern Territory
Language: Pintupi
Known as: Gracie Jurrah Nungarrayi, Gracie Nungarrayi Jurrah, Gracie Nungurrayi
Dreamings: My Country (Kintore), Women's Dreaming

Gracie Nungarrayi Jurrah comes from Kintore, known to Pintupi people as Walungurru, a community around 530 kilometres west of Alice Springs by road and only about 40 kilometres from the Western Australian border. Kintore was established in 1981, when Pintupi families moved back out to their own Country after decades at Papunya and Haasts Bluff, and Gracie belongs to that returned generation. She divides her time between Kintore and Alice Springs.

Gracie comes from a family of painters. The Kintore women came to canvas in numbers through the mid 1990s, carrying on the painting movement the men had begun in the early 1970s, and the loose, confident handling that came out of that period runs right through her family. Gracie grew up with senior women painting around her. She learned by sitting with them, and the Dreamings she paints were passed down to her by her seniors, which is what gives her the right to paint them.

Her work is traditional in its subject and at times quite free in the way it is put down. She paints with spontaneous strokes rather than tightly measured dotting, a way of working shared by others in her family, and one that reads as contemporary to many eyes while sitting firmly inside the old stories. Gracie paints her Country from above, the way it is held in memory and in ceremony rather than the way it looks from ground level.

DREAMINGS

My Country - This is ancient ground. Sandhill and spinifex running west toward the ranges, broken by rockholes and soakages that have carried people across this desert since the first days. Gracie paints it from overhead, the way the old people hold it, marking the sites and the travelling routes that join them across a landscape that has been read, sung and remembered for thousands of generations.

Women's Dreaming - The stories of the senior women. Ceremony, the gathering of bush foods, and the travels of the ancestral women across Country. These stories are sung and danced as well as painted, and the designs Gracie uses come out of that ceremonial ground. She paints only what has been handed down to her.

This is a narrow painting and can be hung either vertically or horizontally.

This painting was purchased directly from the artist and a gallery certificate of authenticity will be provided with the sale.