Mirrnturr, 1993

synthetic polymer paint on paper

75 x 106 cm

Est. $3,000 – $5,000

Hammer $2,400

Provenance: Mangkaja Arts, Fitzroy Crossing, WA, Cat No. WP71/93 Private Collection, NSW, acquired from the above
Artwork story: Paji Honeychild Yankarr was born at Kurntumarrajarra in jilji, sandhill country, near marsh country along the Canning Stock Route. She married young, was widowed in the desert, and eventually came to Cherrabun Station before settling at Junjuwa community, where she joined the Karrayili Adult Education Centre and met and married her second husband, the artist Boxer Yankarr. It was there that she began to paint. As she said in 1994: "I put water in my paintings, places we were walking around." That practice is legible in Mirrnturr. A great layered form of concentric arcs in deep burgundy, rose, and white rises from a dark ground, outlined in cadmium yellow, forms that carry the memory of both jilji and jila, the sandhills and waterholes of the Great Sandy Desert that shaped her earliest years. Mangkaja's then manager described watching her paint: "there was a sense that she walked around in her paintings, with the broad sweep of the brush, around the places that she walked as a young woman. The waterholes gradually took over the picture plane with the elliptical forms of the centre of the waterhole, bleeding over the edges, reconstructing precisely the view that she would have known as she drew water from the jila." Yankarr was a founding member of Mangkaja Arts and in 1997 worked on the Ngurrara Canvas, the collective painting that underpinned the group's successful native title claim.

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Sale 3 · Lot 100

Paji Honeychild Yankar

c.1912 – 2004

Region: Western Desert
Community: Fitzroy Crossing
Language group: Walmajarri

Mirrnturr, 1993

synthetic polymer paint on paper

75 x 106 cm

Est. $3,000 – $5,000

Hammer $2,400

Provenance: Mangkaja Arts, Fitzroy Crossing, WA, Cat No. WP71/93 Private Collection, NSW, acquired from the above
Artwork story: Paji Honeychild Yankarr was born at Kurntumarrajarra in jilji, sandhill country, near marsh country along the Canning Stock Route. She married young, was widowed in the desert, and eventually came to Cherrabun Station before settling at Junjuwa community, where she joined the Karrayili Adult Education Centre and met and married her second husband, the artist Boxer Yankarr. It was there that she began to paint. As she said in 1994: "I put water in my paintings, places we were walking around." That practice is legible in Mirrnturr. A great layered form of concentric arcs in deep burgundy, rose, and white rises from a dark ground, outlined in cadmium yellow, forms that carry the memory of both jilji and jila, the sandhills and waterholes of the Great Sandy Desert that shaped her earliest years. Mangkaja's then manager described watching her paint: "there was a sense that she walked around in her paintings, with the broad sweep of the brush, around the places that she walked as a young woman. The waterholes gradually took over the picture plane with the elliptical forms of the centre of the waterhole, bleeding over the edges, reconstructing precisely the view that she would have known as she drew water from the jila." Yankarr was a founding member of Mangkaja Arts and in 1997 worked on the Ngurrara Canvas, the collective painting that underpinned the group's successful native title claim.