Nonggirrnga Marawili is one of the great innovators in Yolngu art who has developed a unique style of gestural freedom and simplicity in her bark paintings, prints and larrakitj (hollow log memorial poles). Marawili’s works articulate a deeply personal view of her Country which embodies the powerful Ancestral forces as they flow through the land, sea and sky. 

Marawili grew up on the Madarrpa clan lands on Blue Mud Bay in the Gulf of Carpentaria and is part of an esteemed Yolngu family. She is the daughter of artist and renowned warrior Mundukul Marawili and sister of artist and senior cultural leader Djambawa Marawili. While in the past women were not allowed to represent the miny’tji (sacred clan designs) that are the basis of classical Yolngu art, in recent years they have begun to do so with the permission of their male relatives. Marawili began painting in the 1990s by assisting her husband, Djutjadjutja Munuggurr with his bark paintings. With his authority, Marawili painted his Djapu designs, and continued to do so after his death in 1999. In 2005 she began painting with the Buku-Larrnggay Mulku Art Centre in Yirrkala and by 2011 was painting more prolifically, working on a larger scale and incorporating non-traditional materials such as reclaimed printer toner in her works. Careful to not infringe cultural protocols, Marawili has developed her own visual language beyond the conventions of Yolngu art to express her Madarrpa identity.

Marawili explains:

In 1998 Marawili began printmaking at the Yirrkala Print Space, a medium she continues to experiment with today. Her screenprint Lightning and the rock 2018 depicts the waters at Baratjala, the Madarrpa clan estate adjacent to Cape Shield, capturing the sacred energies of the living landscape. This is where the sacred rock can be seen, standing against the elemental forces, and where Mundukul, the Lightning Snake is said to ‘spit’ lightning into the sky. Marawili’s print is powerful in its free-flowing line, tonal contrasts, and large expanses of colour. She has captured the monsoonal lightning with intuitive lines that traverse the length of the work, concentrated over the four geometric forms that are symbolic of the sacred rock. Yurr’yanna is the Yolngu word to describe the seawater as it hits the rock, with spray flying into the sky and Marawili represents this phenomenon in her application and arrangement of the dots that connect the lightning and the rock. The cluster of these elemental energies at the centre of the work magnifies the intensity of these Ancestral forces and affirms the centrality of this site to Madarrpa.

Marawili is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. She has won the Bark Painting Award in the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in 2015 and 2019, and her work included in exhibitions in Australia and internationally including the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020) and the 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2017). In 2018 the Art Gallery of New South Wales presented a retrospective Nonggirrnga Marawili: From my heart and mind, and a major installation of her work was unveiled at TARNANTHI: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia (2019). Her work is held in major public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. The UNSW Art Collection holds two prints by Nonggirrnga Marawili.

FEATURED WORKS FROM THE UNSW ART COLLECTION

RESOURCES

Yirrkala drawings - Nonggirrnga Marawili | video interview

Noŋgirrŋa Marawili: From my heart and mind by Cara Pinchbeck