CORNELIA TIPUAMANTUMIRRI AND DELORES TIPUAMANTUMIRRI

The Tiwi people have a remarkable ancestral cosmology and unique traditional customs: a spiritual tradition that inspired characteristic art styles focussing on ceremonial cycles celebrated through elaborate dance performances. Participants during these ceremonies exhibited an amazing and intricate variety of body painting that transformed and disguised the dancers. These traditions continue to inform the contemporary practice of the Tiwi Artists with sophisticated geometric designs and contemplative mark making that fuses modern and classical expressions. These designs, traditionally applied with ochres to their bodies and faces as well as to their artefacts and ceremonial carved poles are known collectively as jilamara.

85 year old Cornelia Tipuamantumirri with her jilamara - body painting designs - embodies a typical traditional Tiwi World, but with a distinctive modern resonance that draws comparisons with a minimalistic approach and suggests an unusual musical score sheet that echoes the tones of ancestral life style and order. Cornelia’s meditative compositions, with her deep knowledge of ceremony, dance and song take us on a journey into time from past tradition to a pulsating innovative present.
Jilamara designs are also at the core of Cornelia’s daughter, Delores Tipuamantumiri’s paintings which transcribe the shimmering pulse and rhythms of a tradition of body painting that continue to dance through her canvases in an art of optical effects.

Cornelia and Delores live at Pirlamgimpi – or Garden Point- on the North Western corner of Melville Island and are masters of the pwoja the traditional Tiwi hardwood comb the Tiwi use to create their emblematic patterns to transcribe the impressions of their own world views. Both artist work at Munupi, the distinctive Tiwi Art Centre that developed through an unique history its own style of painting, traditional carving, print-making and an historically famous pottery.