Mick Gill Tjakamarra, circa 1920-2002, WANAYARRA

synthetic polymer paint on canvas  
bears artist's name, size and Warlayirti Artists catalogue number 567/89 on the reverse  
178.3 BY 120CM  

Provenance: 
Painted at Wirrimanu (Balgo Hills) in 1988 
Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills 
Donald Kahn Collection 

Exhibited: 
Aboriginal Art from the Collection of Donald Kahn, Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Florida, 1991; Carolino Augusteum Museum, Salzburg, The Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Naprstkovo Museum, Prague and The Museum of Ethnology, Warsaw during 1992-1993
Dreamings - Tjukurrpa: Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, The Donald Kahn Collection, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 26 July-16 October 1994 
Australian Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert- The Donald Kahn Collection, Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh, 3 December 1994-28 January 1995 
Desert Dreaming: Australian Aboriginal Art, Albertina, Vienna, 15 June - 26 August 2007   

Literature: 
Geoffrey Bardon and Vivien Johnson, Australian Aboriginal Art from the Collection of Donald Kahn, Miami: Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, 1991, p.45 cat.no.14 (iIlus.), p.74-75 
Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker (ed.), Dreamings - Tjukurrpa: Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, The Donald Kahn Collection, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1994, p.32, cat.no.14, (black and white illus.) pp.98-99 (colour illus.)

Cf. For other paintings by the artist see Lightning Dreaming at Kurra, 1988, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, in Ryan, J., Mythscapes: Aboriginal art of the desert from the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1989, p. 62; Nyuntul, 1990, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, in Quaill, A., Marking Our Times: Selected works of art from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collection at the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1996, p. 46, and Undaladda Wati Kutjarra, 1993, in Cowan, J., Wirrimanu: Aboriginal art from the Balgo Hills, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1994, p.66, plate 3 (illus.).
 
Mick Gill was one of the first artists at Balgo Hills to enter the public domain of the art world. He showed three paintings in the groundbreaking exhibition of Balgo paintings, Art from the Great Sandy Desert, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1986. The accompanying exhibition brochure contains an essay by the eminent anthropologist, Professor R. M. Berndt, who with his wife and fellow anthropologist Catherine first visited Balgo in 1958, and subsequently conducted research there (see O'Ferrall, M., ed., Art from the Great Sandy Desert, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1986). Mick Gill was not a prolific artist, but he was a man of high ritual status and his subjects were the major ancestral beings of the Kukutja people. Wanayarra, for example, are great Snake ancestors who carried the Water Dreaming across the land, to Liltjin, the site in this painting. The central Snake entered the ground at Liltjin and is there to this day, hence Gill's depiction of the Snake as though its body were cut into pieces.