Natural earth pigments on carved ironwood with remnants of cockatoo feathers attached with beeswax

Executed on Bathurst Island in 1966
The Dorothy Bennett Collection
The Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art, Perth, Western Australia
Sotheby', Aboriginal and Tribal Art, Sydney, 9 September 1997, Lot 33, and illustrated on catalogue cover
The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands

A double-sided figure depicting two of the main protagonists in Tiwi cosmology, Purukuparli, the father of the deceased son, and his brother Tapara, the Moon Man, who had betrayed him by stealing his wife Bima. Djulabinyanna was one of the foremost Tiwi artists of the post World War II era. He was among the first to sculpt individual human figures that represent the ancestors of the Tiwi. Djulabinyanna’s sculptures possess distinctive features: arms hang down from bulbous heads and shoulders akin to a hunched posture adopted by dances in Pukumani funeral ceremonies (Isaacs, J., Tiwi: Art, History, Culture, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2012, p.134). The aperture framed by the hips, legs and base of the sculptures relates to the ‘windows’ cut out of Pukumani burial poles. Djulabinyanna’s figures are painted in patterns of lines, cross-hatching and dotting. The faces are intensely expressive of the grief felt at Tiwi funerals.

WC