Kulunypa – selected small works from the Spinifex Arts Project

SPINIFEX ARTISTS usually work on large scale canvases, covering the surface with their signature webs, roundels and other motifs depicting the remote salt lakes and tali country of the Western Desert.

Kulunypa is the same, but different.
Presented on comparatively small canvases each measuring sixty by seventy-five centimetres–using the same marks we have come to identify with each artist–albeit on a much smaller scale, with all the bold and striking details we have come to expect from the Spinifex Arts Project.

This adaptability is not only the skill of the artist’s hand to reframe a composition within a specified size, but also because painting country is akin to identity. Knowledge and the cultural processes that govern tjukurrpa, dictate how that identity translates into paint; being able to identify country and story by what you depict and the laws surrounding how it may be done.

Knowing country for an Indigenous artist is knowing who you are and where you came from. Whether painting large or small–the country, the story and the identity–remains the same.