Missed Wynne

What an opportunity lost! The unanimous choice of Richard Lewer’s portrait of Amata artist, Iluwanti Ken as the Big One – the Archibald Prize winner – could surely have encouraged the Art Gallery of NSW’s trustees to recognise Iluwanti herself by awarding her the Wynne Prize for landscape for her magnificent ceramic and wooden nest – Nguntju Waiawunuku manngu palapai/ Mother Eagle makes a nest. What a story that would have been.

Instead, they seemed ignorant of last year’s major NATSIA Award winner, Gaypalani Wanambi’s work, Burwu/Blossom. For they gave the Wynne Prize to her for a virtual repeat of that outsize hanging work on the back of an accumulation of Arnhemland road signs. And, once again, visitors spent as much time marvelling at the signs as they did admiring the Wanambi Tree with its blossom attracting the bees who make sugarbag, the much-appreciated (and sacred) local honey. I have to admit that I wish Wanambi’s etched grey metal panels lived up to her colourful description of the meaning behind her work: “Wuyal felled the ancestral Waṉambi tree, causing a river of honey and thus founded the Marrakulu clan homeland at Gurka’wuy. The Marrakulu dance as bees in their ceremony, elbows extended, hands clutching stringybark leaves, which vibrate as wings”.

But it seems that the trustees may have been in the zone. For a call to Yirrkala to pass on the good ($50,000) news brought the comment that, seasonally, it was perfectly timed – for the Binykurrngu Mawulul, the Wanambi Tree or stringybark was in full bloom, and the bees were buzzing. Gaypalani on film, ever modest, was less effusive: “My father (Wukun) was a great artist and I learnt by his side. He made bark paintings, video and metal. He passed away too young and we miss him. We are descended from the honey spirit Wuyal”.

Actually, I continue to think that the 2024 version of Gaypalani’s River of Honey story that was seen in the impressive Yolŋu Power show last year at the AGNSW – full of a variety of textures – was vastly superior to either of her winning works.

But, of course, it’s good that tribal cultures are exposed in our southern cities to add to the general understanding of their complexity in a world too often associated in media-fed minds with distress and violence. So it was delightful to find Iluwanti Ken had made the trip from her APY Lands home with the help of the APY Art Centre Collective management. Ken is an elder, healer and painter who loves to promote the maternity of her Desert eagles on canvas. In the Wynne, though, she has been bold (with the help of LeShay Swan and Justine Anderson) in telling her familiar story on a different, three dimensional canvas. It would seem that the trio work together at the APYACC Studio in Adelaide. LeShay has Pumani family links, and will be having her first solo show as a ceramicist at the Sabbia Gallery in Sydney in August. Justine is a Tjanpi Desert weaver. A formidable team, but perhaps the trustees were reluctant to divide the prize.

Explaining his choice to portray Iluwanti, Richard Lewer told us: “In person, Iluwanti is a small woman, but she carries immense, quiet authority. I painted her life size, so her presence meets the viewer directly. The yellow ochre background holds the intensity of the heat and light we were working in. She loves bright clothing, which feels inseparable from her spirit, and the traces of paint on her arm acknowledge her as a working artist, as if she has just stepped out of the studio”.

With the Melbourne-based Lewer and Adelaide-based Ken both there for the media scrum today, it does suggest that the trustees must have made their choices earlier than usual, earlier than traditional, on the morning of the Prizes. The Sulman Prize-winner, Lucy Culliton had also come in from the country, Cooma, where she lives.

You can check out the trustees’ 294 selected works across the three prizes + 70 Young Archies selected by artist Jumaadi from tomorrow morning until 16 August.

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