Sugar Bag Ceremony
Josie Petyarre Kunoth
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About Artwork
Code: EDA-JK1839/19
Artist: Josie Petyarre Kunoth
Region: Apungalindum, Central Australia
Medium: Polymer acrylic on linen
Size: 90cm x 120cm
Sugar Bag Paintings
The term ‘sugar bags’ is used to describe the sweet honey made by one of around 14 species of native stingless bees found across Australia. As a visual motif, it is one of the most variable and iconic in Australian Indigenous art.
According to Petyarre, these paintings contain ‘all the sweetness of the bush’ – not just the sugar bags themselves, but also the colourful bush grevillea and corkwood flowers that produce the honey, the changing colours of the season, and the travel of the bees across the landscape. In Petyarre’s case, this is landscape of her father’s Alhalkere country of Utopia in the eastern desert, to which the sugar bag Dreaming is associated.
In Petyarre’s sugar bag paintings we can see an artist using a stored cache of visual ideas – circles, dots, dashes – and twisting them in order to find new ways to depict the overlap of country and culture; to represent the shifting metaphors of the physical, geographical and spiritual. What could be waterholes or sandhills, winding rivers or desert blooms all come together in a personal experiment in colour and form.
Excerpt from Henry F. Skerritt, ‘Preview: Josie Kunoth Petyarre: Sugarbags’, first published in Artist Profile Magazine, Issue 15, May 2011, pp.122-123.
Artist Information
Josie Petyarr Kunoth is an Anmatyerr artist from the eastern desert region of Utopia. She lives in a remote outstation named Apungalindum, central Australia with her husband, Dinny Kemarre Kunoth, their five sons, four daughters and four grandchildren. Josie began producing art in the early-1980s as part of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group. She was involved in the 1988 Picture Story batik project and the 1989 A Summer Project which marked the beginning of her painting in acrylic on canvas. Her paintings represent awely – women’s ceremonial stories and dreamings often celebrating the sustenance from her country – the bush yam, yam seed, the conkerberry and other plants.
Josie and her partner Dinny also sculpt quirky birds, animals and ceremonial figures and AFL footballers from the wood of the native bean tree. They often collaborate on large projects such as sculptural installations and paintings of city and bush scenes. They were joint finalists in the X-strata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. where they exhibited colourful sculptures of everyday objects. Josie was also a selected entrant in the 25th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award exhibition, and the Basil Sellers Art Prize at Ian Potter Museum in Melbourne.
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Ethical Trade Details
Eastern Desert Art is a member of the Indigenous Art Code of Conduct and the Aboriginal Art Association of Australia and sells directly to collectors and galleries nationally and internationally.
To demonstrate provenance, artworks are sold with an Indigenous Australian Art Commercial Code of Conduct Certificate. These Certificates provide the purchaser with information on the artist, the story of their painting (when permitted by the artist under cultural law) and photographs of the artists with their paintings. The artworks are painted on prepared Belgian linen using polymer acrylics.
The local Alyawarre and Anmatyerre artists prepare and work on their paintings at the Eastern Desert art shed located on our property adjacent to Utopia.
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