ALWAYS WALKING COUNTRY : YARRKALPA PARNNGURR

(This artwork contains images of people who have since died.)

The second work in a series of collaborations between Wallworth and the Martu people of the Western Desert, this immersive installation comprises painting, song and moving image. Yarrkalpa Parnngurr was first presented at the Dark Heart Biennial, at the Art Gallery of South Australia. 2014 and was then purchased to be held in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Australia.

Lynette Wallworth and Anohni along with camera person Pete Brundle and sound recordist Liam Egan travelled to Parnngurr community about 1000 kilometres north-east of Australia’s most isolated capital city, Perth. Here they worked alongside Martu artists Kumpaya Girgirba, Yikartu Bumba, Karnu (Nancy Taylor), Ngamaru Bidu, Janice Yuwali Nixon, RR (Reena Rogers), Thelma Judson and Nola Taylor as the women painted over 10 days creating a massive collaborative painting,

Yarrkalpa (Hunting Ground)

The resulting installation captures this unique, cross-cultural exchange.

Using time-lapse photography Lynette Wallworth filmed the creation of the painting, over 10 days and the immersive multi-screen result shows the painters, disappearing and reappearing as they co-create the landscape growing across the canvas, held between images of their daily lives and time passing.

The first revelation of the Martu women’s painting was the two white creek-bed lines that stretch across it like spines. This was what much of the discussion was about before the painting could begin, and then Kumpaya and Ngamaru took a brush and began to make the marks. Afterwards it became clear that those two lines and their distance from each other told the artists everything they needed to know about what to paint and where. Everything to scale… flood plains, animal crossing places, sand dunes, water holes, hunting places, clay pans, and the spinifex – burnt, unburnt, regrowth.

Ten days, eight women sitting painting in the hot art shed at Parnngurr, surrounded by dogs, pannikin mugs, dust, visitors and family who came each day to see what was unfolding across five metres of linen. Some days the dogs fight, we cook sausages, turn on all the fans and Nyarrie, thankfully, sings for rain. Some days someone comes sad from the loss of a loved one and there is crying and wailing before painting again. Some days someone has to go to court and help family, school kids visit, the shopkeeper brings cold drinks and the sun is so hot it’s hard to breathe. Still painting and singing. The finches circle endlessly looking for water, the new school teacher arrives and his car won’t work. We travel to the place of white gums at night for a feed and sit under the stars. In the morning, painting and singing.

These are the things that happened across an expanse of days, but when I return to my home in Newtown I realise that we have been sitting in a different time. The painting called everything around it into itself. When we travel back across the country I feel as though I am moving across the painting, as though I am small and the expanse around me has become more distinctive because of the painting. I look at the colours across the land and realise I am seeing definition in bushes and plants and sand that I missed before – because of the painting. I start to see the painting as a skin lifted from the land and resting now on the floor of the shed but holding something of the sinews of the country underneath it. As though the two could be transplanted, the painting as a skin could be expanded, placed again across the country where it would settle once more.

This trip, our being there, was an invitation to the birth of something not yet created and already existing. I have caught it in my lens but only a fraction of it. Anohni sang a new song that holds all the painters names inside it. We are showing you the pieces of what we could bring back. Maybe putting them together something can be shared that is larger than image and song, than painting and words, but which holds all those things and sometimes takes its form, so we can come closer to it and feel it breathing.