‘Luminous’ work captures spirit of place and Telstra indigenous prize

The Telstra indigenous art awards returned to tradition this year.

Winner Jukuja Dolly Snell.

The Telstra indigenous art awards returned to tradition this year, with octogenarian Kimberley painter Jukuja Dolly Snell taking top prize for her waterhole landscape Kurtal.

The warm, colourful acrylic was painted by the wheelchair-bound veteran over three weeks in Fitzroy Crossing, in northern Western Australia, where she lives but it evokes her birthplace in the Great Sandy Desert.

Eva Nargoodah, acting as her great-aunt’s translator, said: “It represents an important part of her life. It has very happy memories, her paintings always show water.”

Snell began painting in the mid-1980s, has exhibited since 1991 and held her first solo show in Darwin last year. Her family’s creativity is on display across the generations: her grandson Sylvester Snell has appeare­d on screen and her husband, Spider Snell, a former dancer­ and artist, won the Telstra painting award in 2004.

Snell said her husband was instrumental in saving her brother’s life by pulling him from the waterhole depicted in her painting.

The nation’s most prestigious indigenous art prize boasts a $75,000 purse — $50,000 to Snell and $5000 to winners in each of five categories: painting, bark, paper, 3D and youth.

Josh Muir, a self-taught artist from Ballarat, in Victoria, took out the youth category with his zine-inspired photographic work Bunnin­yong, which appropriates the name of the town where he recently­ lived with his mother. Muir was the only one of 65 finalists from 293 entries representing the most populous states of Victoria and NSW.

Among the finalists there is a handful of Cairns and Cape York artists but the majority of others are from desert territories, in a return­ to tradition for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islande­r Art Award, criticised in recent years for becoming too broad and unfocused.

Two of the judges, National Gallery of Victoria director Tony Ellwood and last year’s painting prize winner Daniel Walbidi, were not available for comment but their co-judge, Art Gallery of NSW curator and Gamilaroi woman Cara Pinchbeck, said quality determined chosen finalists.

“It’s irrelevant where the artist is from,” she said.

The judges chose the finalists in April from submitted images, then convened in Darwin last week to judge the winners. Pinchbeck said Snell’s work was the clear favourite: “We kept talking about the lumino­us nature of the work.”