Janangoo Butcher Cherel

(circa 1920-2009)

Dilly Bag & Manyi, 2002

Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency, Fitzroy Crossing, Western Australia
Purchased from Raft Artspace, Darwin in June 2002
The Laverty Collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED:
Imanarra - recent works on paper by Butcher Cherel, Raft Artspace, Darwin, cat. no. 4

JANANGOO BUTCHER CHEREL
Janangoo Butcher Cherel is an artist whose work
challenges categorization. Born of a Gooniyandi father
and a Gija mother, he spent the early part of his life as a
cattleman on Fossil Downs Station in the Kimberley. He
commenced to paint in the early 1990s after Mangkaja
Arts Resource Agency was established at Fitzroy Crossing.
Ever resourceful and self-contained, Janangoo would sit
in his corner studio of Mangkaja Arts and put in a full
days' work, day after day. His experiences as a stockman
and of the troubled history of the Kimberley provided
Janangoo with a wealth of subject matter for his art,
always represented in the context of the Ngarrangkarni
(Dreaming) and the Law: he was an advocate for the
retention of law and ceremony amongst younger
generations and he used his art as a teaching mechanism.
Janangoo taught not only the young Gooniyandi in his
community at Muludja, but a world beyond. Janangoo's
extensive range of imagery is drawn from observation
of the minutia of the natural world to Gooniyandi
cosmology, ceremony and its associated objects, and
always situated in his ancestral lands. His sense of
symmetry and composition, the delicacy of the touch
of his brush and the fields of repeated motifs create a
visual poetry that verges on the abstract; Janangoo '...
reimagine[s] the world through nonfigurative means.'
(Sprague, Q., Groundwork: Janangoo Butcher Cherel, Mick
Jawalji, Rammey Ramsey, Melbourne: The Ian Potter
Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, 2011, p. 9).

Janangoo was proclaimed a Living Treasure by the
government of Western Australia in 2004. Other than
Groundwork in 2001, his work has been included in several
other major exhibitions, including Images of Power;
Aboriginal Art from the Kimberley at the National Gallery of
Victoria in 1993, The Imanara Series/ Kerry Stokes Collection
at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2000; the
Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery
of Victoria in 2006; Cross currents: focus on contemporary
Australian art, at the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Sydney in 2007; Breaking boundaries—contemporary Indigenous
Australian art from the collection, Gallery of Modern Art—
Queensland Art Gallery in 2008; and Ancestral Modern:
Australian Aboriginal Art: Kaplan & Levi Collection, at the
Seattle Art Museum in 2012.

Wally Caruana