TURKEY TOLSON TJUPURRULA

Turkey Tolson was born under a tree beside a creek bed about eight kilometres east of Haasts Bluff. After years of working in the Haasts Bluff stock camp droving cattle to Mount Leibig, he underwent initiation into manhood, and the family moved to the Papunya settlement where Turkey worked as a construction labourer and in the communal kitchen. In 1961 he married and moved with his young family to an outstation west of Papunya. After his first wife’s untimely death, he remarried at Papunya, where he lived during the early years of the painting movement. He joined Papunya Tula artists as one of its youngest members, painting his earliest artworks for Geoff Bardon in 1972.

Throughout the 1980s, Tolson’s unassuming leadership style and commitment to the community led him to remain focused on the more anonymous, collective meaning in his work – to the detriment of any personal ambition. He was, in fact, the artist Chris Anderson of the South Australian Museum had in mind when he stated, ‘Andy Warhol didn’t have a CV either. I mean- they’re not artists on the make. They’re not part of the whole career structure’ (cited in Johnson 1996: 98). Yet Tolson’s individual approach and quiet creative momentum were the hallmarks of what became an enduring career.

During his early period, Turkey Tolson was one of the most innovative and figurative artists of the Papunya Tula movement. In the 1980s, he travelled to Paris with Joseph Jurra Tjapaltjarri to create a sand painting as part of the Peintres Aborigines d’Australie exhibition. He collaborated with renowned artist Tim Johnson, supervising Johnson’s use of sacred designs in Emu, Porcupine and Bandicoot Dreaming 1983. Throughout his distinguished career, Tolson’s experimentality and versatility were abundantly manifest as he embraced new, less traditional mediums, including the prints he created for the Utopia Suite and multicolour woodblocks, which were, according to Stephen Rainbird, ‘a bold expression of his individual sensibility and creativity, his artistic maturity and outstanding carving skill' (1994: 182). His prints were included in the comprehensive survey of Aboriginal printmaking New Tracks, Old Land, which was shown to international acclaim in America, touring 25 venues throughout Australia in the early 1990s.

Turkey Tolson was elected Chairman of Papunya Tula in 1985 and held this role until 1995, despite painting for a variety of outside dealers from the early 1990s onward. He became one of the company’s best-known artists and seemingly had no problem in marrying this status with his desire to act independently when the circumstances seemed propitious.

His paintings were invariably included in landmark exhibitions from the early 1980s. These included the exhibition of works from the Richard Kelton collection, Contemporary Australian Art 1981 at the Pacific Asia Museum in Los Angeles, The Face of the Centre at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1985, Aratjara: Art of the First Australians which toured Germany and the UK in 1993-1994 and Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2000.

Tolson’s versatility in medium and practice was firmly grounded in his superb command of the more traditional painting techniques. His most emblematic and famous images are of Straightening of Spears at Ilyingaungau. Mick Namarari, in fact, was at Kirdungurlu for many of Turkey Tolson’s Dreamings, and this, in part, accounts for the striking resonance between their paintings of the period. Turkey’s Spear Straightening images depict spears lying in the desert. The subtle modulations of line and tone evoke the quintessential desert landscape. This, according to Johnson (1994), was one of the most influential artworks of the Papunya Tula movement. Mindful of the profusion of major abstracted canvases produced by artists like Mick Namarari, George Tjungurayai, Willy Tjungurayai, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, and a number of other senior Pintupi men, Turkey Tolson becomes the pre-eminent figure in the last decade of the Central Desert art movement and the importance of his work can not be overstated.