MELBOURNE.- Tolarno Galleries announced representation of Guruwuy Murrinyina.
Born in 1975, Guruwuy Murrinyina lives with her son at a very remote homeland in Gangan, in the Northern Territory. Gangan is a village of ten houses adjacent to a chain of billabongs, inland from Blue Mud Bay. The nearest town is a four hour drive along dirt roads. This is where her art centre is at Yirrkala. In one of these deep waterholes resides Wititj – the Rainbow Serpent which is encoded in her paintings of lillies.
Guruwuy is the daughter of deceased artist Malaluba Gumana. Guruwuy is one of her five children. Malaluba was a highly esteemed award winning artist who was celebrated for the delicacy of her hand and deft colour mixing skill with earth pigments.
Guruwuy's father was Yaŋalka Murrinyina of the Djarrwark clan whose homeland is Balma to the south and equally remote. Guruwuy had been assisting her mother in her paintings of Galpu clan imagery up until her mother's sudden death in February 2020. In grief for her mother and observing spiritual protocols, Guruwuy did not paint again for over two years.
With her first rendering of her new works it became clear that she had taken a fresh approach to her mother’s theme, using a different palette and even more finely detailed compositions.
Guruwuy's paintings on stringybark, hard board and larrakitj (memorial poles) are rendered with natural earth pigments, exploring a repetitive motif known in Yolŋu Matha language as Dhatam or Water Lilies (Nymphaea sb.)
On the surface, her organic flowing compositions evoke a sense of beautiful tranquility, symbolic of the lily, however the designs link back to a powerful ancestral site known as Garrimala, an expansive inland body of fresh water which holds a powerful narrative and one of the oldest continuous religious iconographical practices – the story of the Rainbow Serpent.
The serpent is manifest in Witij (olive python) who lives amongst the lilies of Garrimala, moving through the water and causing ripples and rainbows against the dark surface of the water represented by Guruwuy’s fine shimmering line work surrounding the lilly leaves and flowers.
Gururwuy lives and works close to this sacred area. She is continuing the representation of Garrimala with her unique palette and compositions inspired by the work of her late mother. These designs encode epic song cycles which chart the movement of this spiritual being through the landscape as a force akin to a cyclone.
The poetry of the songs captures the violence and destruction of the tempest embodied as a giant snake, counterposed against the emerging sun and the shimmering iridescence of the rainbow. The challenge for a Yolŋu artist is to render this meaning within the discipline of natural media. In finding new colours mixed from the red, yellow and black rocks with the addition of white clay, Guruwuy is echoing her mother's expertise in new ways. She also mirrors her mother’s infinite patience and dedication to render these images using only a thin brush made from human hair in thousands of tiny layered strokes.
Tolarno Galleries is looking forward to exhibiting works by Guruwuy Murrinyina in early 2024.
