Paddy Jaminji

(circa 1912-1996)

Untitled (Men's Ceremonial Ground, Springvale), 1984

Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Painted at Warmun, Turkey Creek, Western Australia
Purchased from Mary Macha, Perth in May 1994
The Laverty Collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED:
Mapping our Countries, Djamu Gallery, Australian Museum at Customs House, Circular Quay, Sydney, 8 October 1999 - 27 March 2000
True Stories: Art of the East Kimberley, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 11 January - 27 April 2003

LITERATURE:
Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia's Remote Aboriginal Communities - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2008, pp.210-211 (illus.)
Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Australian Aboriginal Art - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Edition II, Melbourne: Kleimeyer Industries, 2011, pp.222-3 (illus.)

Paddy Jaminji was the original painter of the panels
carried in the Kurirr Kurirr ceremony, and with his kin
nephew Rover Thomas, he was the prime instigator
of a modern painting movement that emerged in the
eastern Kimberley in the wake of Cyclone Tracy. His
role is clearly stated in his own words, recollected by
Kim Akerman as the title to his essay on the artist in the
catalogue of Jaminji's survey exhibition at the Holmes à
Court Gallery in Perth in 2004: '"I Bin Paint'im First":
Paddy Jaminji - Trailblazing Artist of the Warmun
School of Aboriginal Art.'

The Kurirr Kurirr is about Cyclone Tracy and the
destruction of Darwin on Christmas Eve, 1974, by
Wungurr the ancestral Rainbow Serpent. Over the
following months, the ceremony had been revealed
to Rover Thomas by the spirit of a woman who had
died from injuries incurred in a car accident caused by
the flooding waters of the cyclone. The woman was
Jaminji's kin sister and Thomas' aunt; hence Jaminji
was in the correct complementary kin relationship to
execute the paintings, as is customary. The first Kurirr
Kurirr ceremonies occurred in the late 1970s and were
performed to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences
alike as a statement of cultural survival after years of
social disruption for Aboriginal people in the Kimberley.

The first paintings made for sale at Warmun were
usually connected to the Kurirr Kurirr, but in time
artists began to paint unrelated subjects. Jaminji was
particularly intent of preserving Gija culture and
ancestral knowledge through his art. Painted in 1984,
Untitled (Men's ceremonial ground, Springvale) is among the
artist's earliest works that feature a subject unconnected
to the Kurirr Kurirr, as are several other paintings
made in the same year in the collection of the National
Gallery of Australia (see Caruana, W. (ed), Windows on
the Dreaming: Aboriginal Paintings in the Australian National
Gallery, Canberra: Australian National Gallery, and
Sydney: Ellsyd Press, 1989, plates 100-3, pp.173-5).

Jaminji's work has been included in several major
exhibitions in Australia and abroad, including: Recent
Aboriginal Art of Western Australia and Aboriginal Art: The
Continuing Tradition at the National Gallery of Australia
in 1987 and 1989 respectively; Images of Power, Aboriginal
Art of the Kimberley, at the National Gallery of Victoria
in 1993; ARATJARA, Art of the First Australians, at the
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf,
Hayward Gallery, London, and the Louisiana Museum,
Humlebaek, Denmark in 1993-4; and Power of the Land,
Masterpieces of Aboriginal Art, at the National Gallery of
Victoria in 1994.

Wally Caruana