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The centre of Australia's contemporary art scene isn't the wharves of Sydney Harbour or an alleyway in Melbourne: it's a handful of tiny art centres in remote Indigenous communities in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands of South Australia.
This year alone, artists from the APY Lands earned 25 nominations in the most prestigious Indigenous art prize in the country, the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. Not bad for a region that only has around 500 active artists.
Late last week, two artists from the APY Lands were named as finalists in the $100,000 Archibald Portrait Prize, which will be announced at midday on Friday.
Vincent Namatjira, who lives in the remote community of Indulkana and is the grandson of the iconic painter Albert Namatjira, was shortlisted for his painting Self portrait on Friday.
Tjungkara Ken, who paints at Tjala Arts in Amata, was also announced as a finalist for her shimmering work Kungkarankalpa tjukurpa, Seven Sisters Dreaming, a self-portrait.
Ken's work is only the second abstract Indigenous painting to make the Archibald shortlist.
That's not all. Fourteen artists from the APY Lands made the shortlist for this year's $50,000 Wynne Prize for landscape painting.
Earlier this month, Peter Mungkuri from Iwantja Arts won the inaugural Hadley's Art Prize, the world's richest landscape art prize.
This year, artists from the APY Lands have also won or been shortlisted for the Ramsay Prize, the Sir John Sulman Prize, the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award and the John Fries Award, among others.
So why are these artists, scattered across huge swathes of remote country in far north-west South Australia, so good?
Barbara Mbitjana Moore, who won the 2012 Telstra Award for painting and is also shortlisted for this year's Wynne Prize, puts it down to the strength of culture in the APY Lands.
"We got lots of old people — the elders," she says. "They bring out the culture for us to be really strong, to do lots of good artwork."
Moore, who paints at Tjala Arts in Amata, a community surrounded by the rust-red Musgrave Ranges, also emphasises the work of Tjala manager, Natalie O'Connor.
"She's really good for us. The manager's pushing us, pushing us. She likes seeing lots of good painting, and she's tells us, 'Keep on doing it, it's really good!'"
For Moore, spending time on her country in Ti Tree, in the Northern Territory, is central to the creation of her vibrant, award-winning paintings.
"It's about looking to countryside, and coming back and starting to use different kinds of colours from the bush.
"Looking at the countryside and getting it in my head — the landscape, the sky, the trees, the mountains — bringing it back and getting the colours on the canvas."
Nici Cumpston, the artistic director of Tarnanthi, the Art Gallery of South Australia's Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, has been coming to the art centres in the APY Lands for years.
"It's always such a privilege to be able to come and see the artists on this beautiful country yet again, and to see where the artists are getting their inspiration from," she says.
"The people here are just so proud of their country, their art centre, the work that everybody is doing and the accolades that people are achieving."
Cumpston points to the diversity of the work coming out of these art centres — everything from huge acrylic canvasses and traditional wood carving or punu, to photography, film and sound work. She believes the calibre of work stems from the ingenuity and drive of the individual artists.
"When you get to know each artist, you can just see the vibrancy and dynamism within them as people, and that is certainly played out in the canvasses," she said.
"It's part of who they are and we're just so lucky to see this first hand."
Mumu Mike Williams is a senior law man and artist who lives and works in the community of Mimili, about 250 kilometres south-east of Amata.
Earlier this year, he won the inaugural Footscray Art Prize, and he's also a finalist in this year's Wynne Prize for a collaborative work he made with Willy Muntjantji Martin and Sammy Dodd.
Williams' recent works are powerful statements about Indigenous land ownership.
He's painted straight onto canvas mailbags from Australian Post, pointedly ignoring the warning stamped on each bag: "Theft or misuse of this bag is a criminal offence — penalties apply."
Instead, he's emblazoned bright blue words in Pitjantjatjara and concentric circles representing rockholes across each mailbag, which hang from a kulata, or spear.
"Pampuntja Wiya: that means don't touch!" he says, pointing to his work. "Don't touch rockhole, don't touch our dreaming. I'm talking to politicians, to the government."
Williams says that part of the reason that artists from the APY Lands keep winning awards is because they know the market so well. "It's because we learn more and more and more to win!" he says, laughing.
But he says the real key to success of artists from the APY Lands is their tjukurpa, a complex concept involving law, country and ancestral creation stories that touches everything in Anangu spiritual and social life.
"This mailbag is so I can tell the world about Anagnu tjukurpa, so they can know. Look at the land and tjukurpa, because they are pretty important."
Georgia Moodie travelled to the APY Lands courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, contemporary-art, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, indigenous-culture, community-and-society, marla-5724, sa, alice-springs-0870, nt
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