Regina Wilson PILAWUK is an unparalleled Aboriginal artist with a talent and technical virtuosity that she demonstrates in two very different arts: basketry and painting. Born in 1948, she grew up in the Daly Mission established south of Darwin by Austrian Jesuits in the late 19th century. She was forbidden to perform ceremonies deemed pagan by the missionaries, to speak her native language with her relatives, or to practise basketry, an art that had been passed down through the generations in her family group for millennia. The man who would later become her husband, Harold Wilson, was taken from his family as a child and raised on Melville Island by a Tiwi artist. It is easy to understand why they both decided to flee the Daly mission in 1969, accompanied by their children and four other members of their group, to return to the land of their ancestors and settle in what would become in 1973 the community of Peppimenarti, located in the Daly River wetland, 300 km south-west of Darwin. Peppimenarti or "big rock" was founded on a sacred site and represents for the Aborigines who settled there a real return to their roots. Finally able to practice basketry, Regina taught it to the younger children as well as the ritual ceremonies of her people. It was while participating in the Pacific Arts Festival in Noumea in 2000 that she and her friends had the idea of taking up painting. Indeed, this medium attracted their attention because it allowed them to record the forms of the basketry objects in a more permanent way than the objects themselves. The artists reproduced the designs of the objects they were weaving on canvas. Regina Wilson's intricate, hypnotically patterned paintings have attracted the interest of the art world. In 2003 she was awarded the renowned Telstra National Indigenous and Torres-Strait Islander Art Award for best Aboriginal painter. Since then, her work has been exhibited in Australia as well as in Europe and North America, where a recent touring exhibition ("Marking the Infinite") has seen her paintings hanging between 2016 and 2019 in the following museums: Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans; Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC and the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
Collections:
The British Museum, London, UK
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
Queensland Art Gallery, Melbourne, Australia |
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