Jackie Kurltjunyintja Giles Tjapaltjarri - (Gay'wu Aboriginal Arts and Knowledge) by Hetti Kemarre Perkins & Georges Petitjean & Michael Stitfold

Book Synopsis

The art of Jackie Giles is a bridge between Aboriginal cosmology and the modern world. His paintings reveal the profundity of Dreamtime and the wisdom possessed by traditional healers. Text in English and French.

For a large part of his life, Jackie Kurltjunyintja Giles Tjapaltjarri (ca 1935-2010) led a nomadic existence, traveling across large tracts of and later spending time in small communities in Australia's vast Western Desert region.

Jackie Giles was renowned as a man of great erudition and a powerful healer, Maparnjarra in his native Ngaanyatjarra language. The powers of these traditional healers include the gift of seeing into the bodies and even the spirits of others. In the 1990s, Jackie Giles started painting with acrylic on canvas. Mr Giles, as he was often called, combined an intimate knowledge of his land with his own oneiric visions to build what became a significant personal oeuvre. These paintings celebrate the Tjukurpa (Dreaming), which pervades the land and is a cornerstone of its identity.

Built around labyrinthine patterns and monumental shapes, these dynamic, rhythmical compositions allude to the esoteric, sacred subject matter of the Dreaming. The intense, striking works that make up this awe-inspiring oeuvre manage to link two dimensions: Ngaanyatjarra cosmology and the rapidly changing modern world.

Text in English and French.

About the Author

Hetti Kemarre Perkins, daughter of Aboriginal rights activist Charles Perkins, is an Arrernte and Kalkadoon art curator and writer. From 1989 until 2011 Perkins worked at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), including thirteen years as senior curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. She co-organized the Australian entry for the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2010, she organized the project "art + soul: a journey into the world of Aboriginal art", which incorporated a significant exhibition, an accompanying book and a three-part television documentary made by ABC Television. Hetti Kemarre Perkins has organized several major exhibitions and projects, as well as co-organizing a major retrospective of Emily Kam Kngwarray's oeuvre held at the National Gallery of Australia in 2023/2024. Georges Petitjean is an art historian whose PhD thesis at La Trobe University in Melbourne examined the art of the Western Desert. He has lived and worked in Australia for many years and has closely followed the work of many artists in central Australia and in the Kimberley since 1992. He was curator of the Aboriginal Art Museum Utrecht (AAMU), Netherlands, from 2005 to 2017, when he was appointed curator of the Collection Bérengère Primat. Georges Petitjean's main area of interest is the trajectory Australian Aboriginal art has followed from its origins to the world of international contemporary art. He has acted as a consultant or organizer for numerous Aboriginal art exhibitions in Europe and Australia, and continues to write about Aboriginal art and culture. Michael Stitfold was a field officer for Papunya Tula Artists in the Communities of Kintore and Kiwirrkurra between 2002 and 2004. In 2005 he was appointed manager of Kayili Artists, an art center located in Patjarr, a small Aboriginal Community in a remote part of the Gibson Desert in Western Australia. While there, he worked with Jackie Kurltjunyintja Giles Tjapaltjarri and traveled with him to Sydney in 2009. From 2012 until 2020, he worked with Munupi Arts in the Tiwi Islands and was briefly involved with the Tennant Creek Brio (Nyinkka Nyunyu Arts and Cultural Centre). Through these experiences he gained extensive knowledge about managing art centres in remote Communities, acting as an intermediary between the artists and the broader art world. He has also acted as manager for Injalak Arts in northwest Arnhem Land.