Description
Artist Roese Pwerle
Language Group Anmatyerre
Art Centre/ Region Utopia/ Central Desert
Title & edition number Body Painting #1 – Edition of 50
Year 1998
Size of Paper Magnani 300gsm 42 x 60cm : 56 x 76cm
Catalogue Number RPBP1
Printer Red Hand Prints
Provenance Utopia Awely Batik Aboriginal Corporation
The practice of awely is a collective form of matrilineal kinship and sharing of knowledge of the land, customs, and Ancestral Creation (Dreamtime) stories. Teachings are expressed in different modalities such as song, rhythm, melody, gestures and dance, gathering, graphic imagery, totem objects, and spatial orientation. Within awely, there are many differentiated roles and relationships which form a complex whole.
Awely is important to kin bonding, education of country, and the passing on of tradition, which is done through gradual participation and teaching of the young.
Aboriginal Fertility prints
This is one of a range of 14 limited edition screen-prints on paper exclusively available through Songlines. The prints have not been exhibited or offered for sale since 1999, the year they were created by eight Indigenous women artists. Images of the prints were used as slides by Fay Nelson, then Director Aboriginal Arts Board, Australia Council, in her keynote address at the landmark Sydney IVF Fertility Conference held at Darling Harbour Conference Centre.
The prints and Dr Nelson’s essay ‘Aboriginal Fertility’ are documented in the conference proceedings published as Towards Reproductive Certainty – Fertility and Genetics beyond 1999 edited by Robert Jansen and David Mortimer with the assistance of Karen Coote, published by The Parthenon Publishing Group.