Sylvia Ken is part of a new generation of Indigenous women artists at the forefront of contemporary painting in Australia. Ken’s gloriously coloured paintings of the night sky depicts the Seven Sisters Creation story and reflects her deep cultural knowledge and connection to Country. The Seven Sisters is the central and reoccurring subject of Ken’s paintings. It is one of the most important and widespread Creation stories and is told, sung, painted, and danced across the Central Desert to the west coast of Australia. The Ken family are traditional custodians of significant sites where this Creation story takes place and the story carries deep personal and familial importance for the artist.
I paint my family’s side of the country where the Sisters travelled through Cave Hill and Alkunyunta, all the way through to Kuli. My right to paint this part of the Dreaming is established. Tjukurpa mulapa means a really important and true story. [i]
Sylvia Ken
born 1965, Pitjantjatjara
Seven sisters 2019
synthetic polymer paint on linen
122.0 x 300.0 cm
Purchased 2019 (P 2019/1138)
© Sylvia Ken/Copyright Agency, 2020
The Seven Sisters story tells of the journey of the seven sisters that make up the star cluster known as the Pleiades. They are pursued by an Ancestral being, in the guise of an older man called Nyiru (or Nyirunya), across the country. Fleeing from Nyiru’s unwanted attention, the Sisters travel between the sky and the earth, but he always finds them. He turns himself into kampurarpra (bush tomatoes) to eat, and the Ili (fig) tree for them to camp under, all to try and catch them. Seeing his trickery, the Sisters go hungry and run through the night. Eventually the Sisters fly back into the sky, where they can be seen as the constellation of Pleiades, while Nyiru is the constellation of Orion in the Milky Way.
Ken was born in 1965 in the remote community settlement of Amata in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara (APY) Lands of central Australia, near the tri-state border between Western Australia, South Australia, and the Northern Territory. Ken paints at Tjala Arts, the Indigenous owned and run art centre at Amata. She has exhibited widely since 2000, in both solo and group exhibitions. Ken has been finalist in the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in 2013, 2014 and 2018. In 2019, Ken won the prestigious Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, which is awarded annually for ‘the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours.’ She is a member of the Ken Sisters Collaborative, who previously won the Wynne Prize in 2016. Her work is held in the public and private collections in Australia including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.
[i] Sylvia Ken, ‘Sylvia Ken’
Jan Murphy Gallery, date unknown, accessed 14 September 2019.