Ilkurlka

The Spinifex Arts Project was established in 1997 to enable the Spinifex people to document their traditional ownership and their enduring connections to their sacred Country. The collective is comprised of the Pitjantjatjara men and women who were forcibly removed from their homelands in far western South Australia due to British nuclear testing between 1953 and 1963. Many returned in the early 1980s and settled in the nearby Tjuntjuntjara community, Western Australia. Paintings produced by the artists citing their Tjukurpa (ancestral stories and beliefs) and ongoing relationship with these lands formed part of a successful Native Title claim, the first in Western Australia, which, in 2000, returned more than 55,000 square kilometres of land to the Spinifex people.

In 2015, the artists travelled to Ilkurlka, an important soakage site located deep in the Great Victoria Desert, where they spent five days reconnecting with Country and sharing culture through song, dance and art-making. Eight men, aged between sixty and eighty-five, worked collaboratively on Ilkurlka, 2015, a unique interpretation of the kalaya (emu) creation story. This rich and vibrant painting illustrates the ancestral journey across Spinifex Country to Ilkurlka, where kalaya stopped to drink and left impressions still visible today in the rock surface.

The Spinifex artists continue to exhibit their work in leading exhibitions and are represented in major public and private collections globally.

Celia Dottore, Project Manager, Tarnanthi