Lot 1
Banapa
Delores Tipuamantumirri
180 x 120 cm
Ochre on linen
Bid on this piece
This piece has a reserve.
Estimate: $7000 - $10000.
This piece comes professionally stretched
About the Artist
Delores Tipuamantummiri, the only daughter of celebrated artist Cornelia Tipuamantummiri, is also a well-acknowledged artist in her own right. Her late father Steven Tipuantamirri was a ceremony singer and the first Tiwi man who joined the Tiwi Land Council. Of her artist mother, Cornelia Tipuamantumirri, she speaks with great respect as a a good teacher of traditional Tiwi culture. It was through her that she acquired weaving, dancing and hunting skills. Now Delores is passing on these skills to her three children and nine grandchildren. While following in the footsteps of Cornelia’s highly creative flair, Delores Tipuamantumiri also contributes with her creative ingenuity and her own interpretative visual display of optical effects to translate the traditional geometrical designs associated with the remarkable cosmology of the Tiwi People. An ancient spiritual tradition that has inspired distinctive and vibrant art styles focusing on the great Tiwi mythological stories celebrated through their elaborate ceremonial performances.
Delores innovatively elaborates on an Opt Art of ancient time to weave the waves of the surrounding Arafura glittering sea and beats a tempo that engages in reminiscing the sacred ceremonial dances through the rippling patterns created on her canvas. The transcription of her own impressions, affected by the reminiscence of a traditional world-view, resonates well with our contemporary art world, as Delores depicts the vibrations, pulsations and rhythms of an eternal present that merges timelessly and simultaneously between the old and the new. Delores more recent works have all entered important privates collections and while her production of artworks is very small, they are well sought after. Her majestic contributions have been included – and all sold- in the inaugural 2015 Tarnanthi Festival in Adelaide, The Munupi Art exhibition at Luc Berthier Gallery in Paris in 2016, at the Red Dot fine Art gallery in Singapore in 2017, at the annual Tiwi show at the Hilton double Tree in Darwin in 2017, and now in the upcoming June 2018 in Freiburg at the Artkelch gallery. Delores Tipuamantumirri’s works echo the fluctuations of our lives. The Tiwi’s sacred dances, music and stories are latent in their two dimensional vibrating representations of a world that was, layers upon layers of meaning, of a world that is, always changing, but constant through times, as the ripples on the surface of the sea on their island shores carried from generations to generations. Delores’ art works are like interactive meditative tools that meet congruently the eyes of our modern world to suggest its unfathomable depth. She uses the traditional Tiwi comb for her painting, applying natural ochre tones to linen, creating a moving ripple effect suggesting a thrown fishing net.
About the Work
Banapa is the Tiwi word for net. Throw nets are commonly and expertly used for fishing off the beach. The shapes and forms these fish nets create whilst being cast translate into wonderful pictorial patterns.
Notable Collections
Arthur Roe Collection, Melbourne, Australia
Kaplan and Levi Collection, Seattle, Washington, USA