Art on displ​ay in the Supreme Court

The CAA Art and Justice Committee, chaired by the Honourable Justice Livesey, has once again collaborated with the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) as part of the Gallery’s collection outreach program to display Aboriginal art in the Supreme Court.​

Justice Livesey thanks Dr Lisa Slade and the AGSA team for this work, which is the second of several installations planned for the Supreme Court complex.

Dr Slade provides the following information about the art work in Court Room 6.

“A suite of large desert paintings on loan from the Art Gallery of South Australia are currently on display in the Supreme Court. The works selected reflect the breadth of Aboriginal art from Country loosely defined as the Central and Western Desert regions of Central Australia. Two major works by women artists are now on display in Court Room 6.

Maisie Napangardi Granites who was born in Janyinki, an important site not far from Yuendumu on the edge of the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory, calls up Country in her 1992 painting. The painting’s title draws attention to the role of Warlpiri women (Karnta) in ancestral stories with distinct iconography representing the women, bush food and digging sticks. The work was gifted to AGSA by a family with long engagement in northern Australia through their health work. A sister work by Margaret Napangardi Lewis titled Janyinki Jukurrpa, which depicts women traversing Country in search of bushfood, hangs in the Numa mediation suites.

The accompanying work in Court Room 6 is by Pintupi artist Narpula Scobie Napurrula, one of first women artists to make acrylic paintings on canvas at Papunya, and later at Kintore (Walungurru), in the nineteen eighties who is from an artistic dynasty that includes her late brother, celebrated artist Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula. In 1987, the year before it was gifted to AGSA by the Friends of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Napurrula painted this epic story of two ancestral women travelling across vast Country.

This week is NAIDOC week and 2021 theme is Heal Country. Country is key for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and this year’s theme calls on all Australians to care for Country.

Dr Lisa Slade
Art Gallery of South Australia”