SUNFLY TJAMPITJIN

Sunfly Tjampitjin, who was born in the Alec Ross Ranges north-west of Lake Mackay, c1920, began paintings in his mid sixties in 1984, several years prior to the establishment of the Warlyirti Artists at Balgo. As a senior Kukatja ritual leader, he, accompanied by other elder men of the community, sought to create a body of work to record, in the most intimate detail, the site maps of the desert country in which they grew up, prior to outside contact. Sunfly’s early endevours made a significant contribution to the the first exhibition of art from the Balgo community held in Perth in 1986. Art from the Sandy Desert hosted by the Art Gallery of Western Australia, was the first public recognition of the nascent art movement at Balgo Hills and gave the lead to their subsequent commercial success. Despite learning about the painting movement in Papunya in 1971, when a group of Pintupi people traveled to Balgo for ceremonial season, the Balgo elders were cautious in following their initiative “because of the dangers of representing imagery connected to sacred ceremonies in permanent media, which then entered the public domain,” (Watson 1997: 50). When the painting movement began, in light of the “opportunity to establish the nature of their relationship to the land in the eyes of the world at large,” (Caruna 1993: 146) strong links remained with the imagery formerly engraved and painted on tjuringa stones or reserved for body painting in ceremony.

The starkness and simplicity of Sunfly’s compositions is indeed reminsiscent of sacred ground paintings “the style is stripped of subsidiary detail and is startling in its economy,” (Ryan 1993: 93). The bold use of flat blocks of red, yellow, white and black have spiritual significance, for as ochres they embody the transformed substances of the ancestral beings. These same pigments are applied as body paint during ceremonies to reunite the participants with the land. Tjampitjin employed these sacred pigments to depict an element of the Tingari ritual, of which he was a senior custodian. However, the strong linear elements and interconnected circles that represent paths and places denote more than landscape in the traditional sense. They depict an area of ancestral travel, and are representational only in so far as the mythical landscape of the Dreaming and the actual landscape coincide. It is this metaphysical concept of a sign invoking a transcendent reality that underlies the visual language inherent in the art at Balgo. (Ryan 1993: 90). Apart from Sunfly’s representational motifs of Luurnpa, the ancestral kingfisher, beings are often only shown by the mark or trace they leave. This tradition is upheld throughout many parts of the Kimberely, amongst artists such as Rover Thomas, despite Thomas’s visual distance from Sunfly’s aesthetic.

The visually dominant traveling paths in Sunfly’s work connote the intimate connection he retained with the hunter-gatherer way of life. Sunfly only painted a few works before the art centre at Balgo Hills opened, and after its establishment, only when early art coordinators visited him at his camp in Yaga Yaga, 120 kilometers into the sand dunes south of Balgo. Painting, often collaborating with his wife Bai Bai Napangarti, in this isolated settlement meant his bold aesthetic developed independently of other Balgo artists, who relied more on dotting and parallel currents of lines. The effect was to create work of an almost primeval quality. The emotive potency of his work comes from being “like Miro, another artist steeped in his land and culture, whose small stylized paintings, made up of simple black lines and coloured patterns, contain all the knowledge and experience of a lifetime,” (Ted Snell cited in Bardon 1989: 58). This knowledge has impregnated Sunfly’s modest output with far greater value than its weight would suggest, transforming him into a central figure of, and contributor to, the priceless legacy left by the older generation of painters, that remains long after he passed away in 1996.

© Adrian Newstead

References

Bardon, G.1989, Mythscapes Aboriginal Art of the Desert from the National Gallery of Victoria, exhib. cat., National Gallery of Victoria, Ryan, J. (ed). Melbourne.

Caruana, W., 1993, Aboriginal Art, Thames and Hudson, London.

Cowan, J. 1994. Wirrimanu: Aboriginal Art from the Balgo Hills, G+B Arts International.

Ryan, J., 1993, Images of Power, Aboriginal Art of the Kimberley, exhib, cat., National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Watson, C. 1997, ‘Eubena Nampitjin and Wimmitji Tjapangarti,’ Stories: Eleven Aboriginal Artists, Craftsman House Sydney.