Honey Ant Ceremony

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri was for decades the most celebrated Aboriginal artist in Australia and internationally, renowned for meticulously painted works on a monumental scale. Before finding fame, he was a stockman and a noted woodcarver and, at Papunya in the late 1960s, he experimented with paintings based on traditional motifs, working alongside his Anmatyerre cousins Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa. He later joined the ‘painting men’, the group who began the Western Desert painting movement at Papunya from 1971.

Honey Ant Ceremony, only his second or third work after joining the Papunya painters, is considered an early Western Desert masterpiece. Unlike his later vast canvases with their signature dotted nebulae to mask secret-sacred content, this board more explicitly depicts ceremonial matters. The three concentric circles represent underground Honey Ant nests at Yinyalingi, which were excavated by an ancestral woman, surrounded by figurative images of digging sticks, ritual boards and other items.

Barry Patton, Tarnanthi Writer & Researcher