DOB: c.1940 – 21 August 2022. Utopia, Northern Territory
Language: Anmatyerre
Dreamings: Bush Plum (Anwekety), Awelye
Polly Ngale (Ngal) was one of the senior women of Utopia, north-east of Alice Springs. Her country is Alparra, and she carried responsibility for it alongside her sisters Kathleen Ngale and Angeline Pwerle. The Bush Plum Dreaming belonged to the three of them together.
Her working life in art began with batik in the late 1970s, when the women of Utopia started putting their knowledge into wax and dye on silk. The community moved across to acrylic about ten years later, and from 1989 Polly was painting on Belgian linen. That is where her own hand arrived.
She built a painting up in passes rather than laying it down in one go, dotting over dots until the colour underneath glowed through the colour on top. The result is a surface that shifts as you look at it. Those dots carry the fruit, the seed and the flower of the bush plum, along with the Awelye designs that belong with it. She and Kathleen often worked side by side. Polly's eyesight faded in her later years. She kept painting anyway, for the love of the work and for the stories that were hers to tell.
DREAMINGS
Bush Plum (Anwekety) - The bush plum is the conkerberry, a low tangled shrub that carries thorns and grows right through Polly's country. After rain it puts out small white flowers with a strong scent, and the fruit follows. It comes on for only a few weeks in the year, ripening from green through to a sweet black berry about the size of a small plum, which is where the English name comes from. Women gather it hard in that short window, and what is not eaten fresh is dried, stored, then soaked in water again later to bring it back. The plant works as medicine as well, the orange inner bark of the roots soaked and used as a wash, particularly for skin and for sore eyes. The Dreaming for it is a story about wind. Winds blew in from every direction and carried the Anwekety seed out across the country of Polly's ancestors. The first plant grew, fruited and dropped seed of its own, and the wind carried those on again, until the conkerberry grew right through the Dreaming lands. Anmatyerre people hold up their side of it by singing and dancing for the plant so it keeps fruiting, and in recent generations painting has become part of how that is done.
Awelye - Women's ceremony, and the ochre designs that go on the body for it. Polly learned these as a young girl at ceremonies on her own country. Women sing and dance for country, for the health of people and for the land itself, and those same designs carry through into her canvases.
EXHIBITIONS AND COLLECTIONS
Polly was a finalist in the 20th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, in 2003, and in 2021 she was a finalist in both the Calleen Art Award at Cowra and the Fisher's Ghost Art Award at Campbelltown. Her work travelled a long way from Utopia.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
1989 Utopia Women's Paintings, The First Works on Canvas, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney
1990 Utopia, A Picture Story, eighty-eight silk batiks from the Holmes à Court Collection, toured Ireland and Scotland
2000 Paris
2002 Two Sisters, Kathleen and Polly Ngale, Melbourne
2003 20th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Darwin
2004 Contemporary art fair, Grand Palais, Paris
2008 Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Her Legacy, Tokyo
2018 Indigenous Australia: Masterworks from the National Gallery of Australia, me Collectors Room, Berlin
2018 Art Paris Art Fair, Grand Palais, Paris
2018 Beyond the Veil, New York
COLLECTIONS
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Holmes à Court Collection, Perth
The Holt Collection
The World Bank, Washington DC
This painting can be hung vertically or horizontally.
This painting was purchased directly from Polly and a gallery certificate of authenticity will be provided with the sale.
