Artist Unknown, UNTITLED (CORMORANT OR DARTER)

natural earth pigments on carved wood  

LENGTH: 65CM  

Provenance: 
Executed at Central Arnhem Land 
Gabrielle Pizzi Collection

Cf. For similar sculptures of birds by Binyinyiwuy (1928-82), made at Milingimbi before 1956, collected by Karel Kupka and now  in the collection of the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, see Karel Kupka, Dawn of Art: Painting and Sculpture of Australian Aborigines, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965 (the English version of Un art à l'état brut, 1962), p. 169, (illus.).
 
Among the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, the cormorant or darter, the ancestral Burala, feeds on the catfish it catches in clan waterholes, a metaphor for the taking of souls from the pool of life. The sculpture takes the form of a rangga or sacred ritual object that is depicted in bark paintings either figuratively, or as a series of elongated forms bearing a catfish design; for a comparison of the two renditions see Ray Munyal's Gurrupurru, c.1984, and Jimmy Wululu's Burala, c.1984, both works in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, illustrated in Djon Mundine, et al., The Native Born: Objects and representations from Ramingining, Arnhem Land, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999, p.138 and p.139 respectively.