Rebecca Hossack with Ampilatwatja artists in Ampilatwatja
The remote deserty community of Ampilatwatja, 200 miles north east of Alice Springs, is home to some 500 people, almost all from the Alyawarr language group. Although deeply connected to their ancestral lands, the artists of Ampilatwatja, when they began to paint, in 1999, made a conscious decision not to record their ‘altyeri’ – or Dreaming stories – but rather to depict the country where those stories belong, the landscape fashioned by the ancestral figures of the Dreamtime. They evolved, moreover, their own unique painting style, combining an almost pointillist dotting technique with some of the conventions of Western representation. The effect is both beautiful and evocative – described in the catalogue for the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery’s 2011 The Art of Ampilatwatja exhibition, as combining ‘the pointillism of Seurat with stark abbreviations of Fred Williams.’ It perfectly captures the shimmering light and desert vegetation of their extraordinary land.
