YINGARNA, c.1989

Important Aboriginal + Oceanic Art
Melbourne
6 October 2010
59

Jimmy Galereya

born 1937
YINGARNA, c.1989

natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark

154.0 x 61.5 cm

inscribed verso: artist's name, Oenpelli cat. 145

Estimate: 
$6,000-8,000
Sold for $11,100 (inc. BP) in Auction 17 - 6 October 2010, Melbourne
Provenance

Private collection, Perth
Sotheby's, Melbourne, 28 June 1999, lot 235
Private collection, New South Wales

Catalogue text

Yingarna is described by the Kunwinijku as the original creator being, a powerful ancestral being of androgynous form who held all the original ancestors or dreaming inside her body until she was speared to let them out. This work probably shows a myth described by Senior Curator Judith Ryan in her publication Spirit in land: bark paintings from Arnhem Land in the National Gallery of Victoria, as ‘an incident in the Ancestral period when “Yingarna” was floating down the East Alligator River in a fish–trap, creating and naming animals, plants and sacred sites and giving land to people as she travelled. “Yingarna” seems to emerge from the fish–trap, which is decorated with rarrk so that it resembles a sacred object.'