tour 16 of 16
The Pacific: Gods and People
Victor Jupurrula Ross, Yarla Jukurrpa ('Bush Potato Dreaming'), a painting
Australian Aboriginal art expresses the
enduring relationships between people and land. At the same time it
is a commercial enterprise by which the artists make money for
themselves and their community. In the Western Desert region, where
this painting was made, earlier art forms were adapted to a
European medium at the beginning of the 1970s. This has led to an
upsurge of artistic creativity and energy, which is also a
political assertion of the sustained presence and importance of
Aboriginal people in
Australia.
This painting
uses acrylic paint on canvas to depict a creation story. It depicts
a yarla, a low-growing bush with beautiful pink flowers, that bears
potato-like tubers. In one telling of the story, two old men,
Jakamarra and Jupurrula, sat down and shook a sacred stone in
Yamaparnta, a place near Yuendemu, where the painting was made. The
yarla plant grew from the stone, and is believed to be the ancestor
of all the plants now found in that place. The concentric circles
in the middle of the painting represent the stone, the waving lines
the plant growing from it. The two semi-circles are the men. Next
to the old men, on the fourth side of the concentric circles, is a
food carrier, with some food in it.