Evelyn Pultara

Station, the cattle property adjoining Utopia Station and has now become a senior custodian for her Dreaming the bush yam. She began painting traditional bush tucker and awelye (women’s ceremonial body paint designs) in 1997 but went on to exclusively paint her plant totem, the bush yam. While rarely indicating any more than necessary about the context of her paintings their content is the pencil yam (atnwelarr) a slender twining plant with yellow pea flowers and edible tubers. This has been an abundant source of food for her Anmatyerr clansmen since the dawn of creation and it is her responsibility to pay homage to it through song and dance in ceremony - and now in art. Her Dreamings, related through haptic adventures in paint, relate the tales of the mythic totemic ancestors who made the land, its people, and its food. Through their telling and retelling and the depiction of their sites in art, these Dreamings provide a song-map that locates the water holes, ochre pits, food sources, and sacred sites of the artist’s country. It has been said that her paintings impart the rhythm of the yam corroborree enacted and retold for time in memoriam through song and dance. While Evelyn’s work has been exhibited since the late 1990’s her first solo exhibition was held at the World Vision Gallery in Sydney’s Leichardt. This was followed in quick succession by solo shows in Milan, Sydney and Melbourne.  In 2005 she was won first prize in the General Painting section of the of the 22nd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin.