Wurrandan Marawili
Aboriginal art connects the past to the future in a tangible way, a timelessness conveyed by artists to their audience through the subtle power commanded in detail and motifs. Yet for Yolŋu artist Wurrandan Marawili, “Only Yolŋu can see the power in the Country. What is its identity? It’s dance, it’s song, it’s parliament.”
Image credit: Wurrandan Marawili, Hidden crocodile, 2024, etched aluminium, 76 × 75 cm. Courtesy the artist and Buku-Larr gay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala
Wurrandan Marawili’s (b. 1983) bark paintings, memorial pole paintings and, in recent years, artworks etched in discarded metal materials found on Country, have come about “because my father [Yolŋu leader Bakulaay Marawili, 1944–2002] was painting when I was young. He was singing and dancing, he tell me the story about the painting and the singing and dancing. He gave me all about the painting. So that is everything the same. It send me same, like my father was doing it. But he was doing it all styles. I get idea from my father, how I looked at the painting. I knew my [way was] doing another way, styles and different ways.”
Marawili’s innovation on his traditions has brought considerable and rapid success, most recently noted with his winning entry to the 2024 Telstra Bark Painting Award (part of the prestigious NATSIA Awards) in Darwin. The painting is called Rumbal, the body/the truth (2023) and draws the viewer in close to a large and irregular shaped bark, with the small painting located centrally on its background material. This proportion of unpainted to painted bark echoes its inspiration in body painting for ceremony. Within its shapes (a square with two triangular forms above) is richly detailed patterning, referring to the body designs used on the first bark paintings collected almost 100 years ago from the Yolu. These designs are specific to the songs of their clan.
In Rumbal we see Marawili’s clan design, which is affiliated with the Maarrpa of the Yirritja moiety. While ‘rumbal’ is Yolŋu for body, it also means true, which relates to the fundamental joining of the... Subscribe to read all articles in full
