The power of Noŋgirrŋa Marawili’s practice connects directly to her extensive cultural knowledge, seniority and longevity – and ability to negotiate tradition with her Yirrkala community. Her revolutionary work has drawn particular acclaim, prizes and intense interest for the level of innovation that she has achieved within the strictures of long-held traditions.
Her work has been prominent in Australia’s major survey exhibitions of recent years, notably the 2021 Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN, Tarnanthi at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide in 2019 and Defying Empire: The Third Indigenous Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra in 2017. She was also the subject of the solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney titled From My Heart and Mind, 2018-19. Awards include The Roberts Family Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Prize in the Wynne Awards, 2019 and her extraordinary achievement winning The Best Bark Painting prizes in both the 2019 and 2015 NATSIA Awards in Darwin. Currently her work is integral to the magical Bark Ladies: Eleven Artists from Yirrkala, on show at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne until 25 April 2022, and was part of Melbourne’s Alcaston Gallery 2022 Annual Collector’s exhibition where, in her work Bolŋu 2021, mesmerising cross-hatching is juxtaposed with three figures, vibrantly dotted shapes and open areas that negotiate darkness and light with poetic force.
For the NGV’s exhibition Marawili contributed larrakitj (burial poles), including nine pink poles and bark paintings which also feature the recycled print cartridge pink which has dominated her work in recent years (mixed with earth pigments and ochre). The larrakitj are presented in a room with mirrored walls, creating an installation as though within an infinite grid. For this work she developed a cross-hatched design that refers to the hunting practices of her husband’s Djapu clan ancestors, who used woven fish traps to catch their prey.
Marawili was born in 1939 and her artistic and cultural lineage in north-eastern Arnhem Land includes her father, Mundukul Marawili, one of the earliest artists to emerge from Yirrkala. The first paintings she produced were executed in collaboration with her husband Djutjadjutja Mununggurr. She is a respected elder in her community and produces prints and carvings in addition to her bark painting, and larrakitj.
While until the early 1970s only men from this community were authorised to paint most sacred designs, iconography, and larrakitj, Marawili says, “I learnt bark painting first, then printmaking… The Djapu clan taught me… I was doing their painting – for the Munuŋgurr clan. And I started on prints. That’s where I learnt Yirritja painting. [When I did a] crocodile painting … I knew straight away: This is my painting. That’s what I said to myself.”
For Alcaston Gallery director Beverly Knight, Marawili’s enormous potential was evident when she first saw her screen prints in the first exhibition of female printmakers from Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre in 2001, where Marawili’s prints sold out immediately. In 2011, when Knight was visiting Yirrkala in the Northern Territory she discovered Marawili had started painting on barks and larrakitj poles.
“In people of strong culture the stories and ideas are there anyway,” says Knight. “She has been able to develop a way of looking and thinking about her art that is special to her and her life – and that is what all great artists do. Whilst her work is bound in a lifetime and many generations of culture, she has a different way of being in the world. From my experience, many senior women develop a sense of freedom with age; however with Noŋgirrŋa it was a combination of a strong work ethic, love of painting and the documentation of her mind’s thoughts.”
Marawili’s art sits outside any prescription, is expressive and organic, and reuses unusual materials. In Marawili’s culture, art is integral to communication. She asserts, “This is just my thinking. No one told me to do this pattern. I did this on my own.”
Featured image: Artist Noŋgirrŋa Marawili. Courtesy the artist and Artereal Gallery, Sydney. Courtesy: the artist, Buku-Larrnggay Mulka, Yirrkala and Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne.