YUENDUMU DOORS

The people of Yuendumu in the early 1980s began transferring their traditional ochre ground paintings to canvas, and then to the doors of the Yuendumu School. In 1983, five artists, painted thirty school doors with Dreaming designs, negotiating the content with other Warlpiri men and women who also collectively owned the designs. Twenty-seven Dreamings (tjukurrpa) were represented on the Doors, referring to more than two hundred sites in Warlpiri and Anmatyerre territory. For thousands of years the Warlpiri people traced their Dreaming symbols onto compacted desert sand as part of their ceremonies and when the ceremonies were over the images would be brushed away by hand or by the desert winds. The Yuendumu doors have now captured these stories in paint. During the early 1980s much of the traditional country of Warlpiri people was only just becoming accessible to them again through the land rights process. By painting the Doors, the artists were expressing not only their link to that country but also their willingness to resume responsibility for those places. The painted Doors were also intended to remind the Yuendumu schoolchildren of a web of sites and obligations extending across their country. The Doors remained at Yuendumu, resisting erasure for twelve years despite the desert wind and sun, and robust treatment from Warlpiri schoolchildren. The entire series of Yuendumu Doors was acquired by the South Australian Museum in 1995 and then restored.

Yuendumu Door No. 4
Old Men and Boomerangs