Yolŋu Power is a major exhibition making its way to Sydney
A new landmark exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales will transport you to Yirrkala, where Yolŋu people are passing down a rich history of multi-generational art-making.
Warning: This story features the names of deceased Aboriginal people.
At Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre in Yirrkala, it’s called ‘the workshop’. An outdoor studio open to the East Arnhem Land elements, which range from thunderous rain to thick, claustrophobic heat. Here, artist Wurrandan Marawili is at work, carving geometric patterns deep into four interlocking slabs of heavy metal. Usually Marawili sits cross-legged, leaning forward with his drill, wearing one of his beloved basketball jerseys and an LA Dodgers cap. “The other day I came in and he was standing up, blasting trance music,” says Will Stubbs, Buku’s long-running co-ordinator, who just celebrated 30 years at the gallery. “It’s the only way he can see the full scope.” From up high, Marawili can survey his universe: the network of triangulated lines that represent water, the diamond-shaped licks of fire and the layer of tangled seaweed on top. Below, barely visible – in life, just as in art – is the distinctive outline of a watchful crocodile.
This, says Stubbs, is the quiet, mesmerising power of Yolŋu art. “Everyone can enjoy the surface. Watch the ripples and reflections,” he explains, his hands gesturing over Marawili’s inscriptions. “But in the water are unknown, invisible things. Just because we can’t see them, doesn’t mean they’re not there.” This month, more than 300 works by Yirrkala artists, shimmering with meaning both hidden and plain, will be on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The exhibition, entitled Yolŋu Power, is a galvanising celebration of Yolŋu art dating back more than 80 years.
We leave the workshop and pass through another room in the rabbit warren gallery, originally built about 1952 as Yirrkala’s hospital. “Nothing to see here,” says Stubbs breezily as we walk, “just more art. There’s lots of it.” Today, Buku is one of the largest and most consequential art centres in Australia, both telegraphing and preserving the legacy of Yolŋu art for future generations. A short hallway, which leads to The Mulka Project – a digital archive fostering a new generation of artists – is lined with awards. Buku artists have won or been finalists for so many of Australia’s most prestigious prizes including the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) – Marawili won it for Best Bark Painting in 2024 – and the Wynne Prize, the walls are groaning with them. It’s been won twice; first, in 2021 by the late Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu and again in 2024 by her sister Djakaŋu Yunupiŋu. “I call this my corridor of fame,” Stubbs says, happily.
At the other end of the centre is the print studio, overseen by Munuy’ŋu Marika. Established in 1995, the studio is a haven for female artists, who train each other in the processes. “I learned through printing my own artwork,” says Marika, who prides herself on working with others to translate their works to paper, while preserving the sanctity of traditional clan designs. Artists include Dhalmula #2 Burarrwaŋa, who won the 2023 NATSIAA Telstra Emerging Artist Award, and whose work spans playful etchings of lost things – “knife, oyster pick, torch, trowel” – and graphic renditions of the stars at night. Marika finds satisfaction in “helping other artists doing printing. Teaching other young people, encouraging other family and friends to work here.”
Some 80 prints will be on display at AGNSW, a nod to the integral role the studio plays in Buku’s history. The print studio supports the art centre, the art centre bolsters the print studio. In Yolŋu culture, everything is connected, an invisible thread knotting the space between people, places and things, linking the present with both the possible and the eternal. Take the ferocious storm raging during my visit, for example. “I can show you paintings about this exact rain,” says Stubbs. It has happened before, and it will happen again.
Naminapu Maymuru-White woke up late. “I was dancing in the rain with my daughter,” the artist says, a wicked grin breaking across her face. Maymuru-White – or Nami, as she is known reverently around the gallery – has a crop of tight, silver curls and, although she is slight, she vibrates with coiled energy. We arrive at her house in Yirrkala in Stubbs’s ancient troop carrier and find her sitting with her daughter on the verandah floor. Both women lean silently over a large piece of bark, daubing with practised hands the shapes of a turtle and fish. This, Maymuru-White tells me later, after collecting her handbag and dispatching Stubbs to fetch a hearty breakfast, is the tale of the two fishermen on their way to the stars. Even in its bare, unfinished form, the painting is alive with story and quietly arresting, but Maymuru-White says there is still a lot of work to do. “I find it very hard sitting on the ground,” she groans, albeit playfully. None of us are getting any younger, I suggest. “It’s true,” she laughs, flashing another of her signature grins. She is 73 years old.
Maymuru-White can remember when the art centre was not an art centre at all. It was here at Yirrkala hospital, in 1972, that she gave birth to her second child and later, when pregnant with her last, that she began painting. In the intervening four decades, Maymuru-White has become one of the world’s most celebrated Yolŋu artists. Last year, she represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and her radiant series Milŋiyawuy (Milky Way) (2024) was acquired by Tate Modern. “People say, ‘You are a star,’” she says, rolling her eyes. (She rolls her eyes many times in conversation.) “No, I’m not,” she declares. A beat. “But I do draw the stars,” she exclaims, collapsing into cackles. In her artwork, constellations appear to twinkle, the flat surface of a painting dissolving into a rippling, iridescent pool. “That’s how I learned,” she explains. “Because in every river you can see a sprinkle of the stars in the water at night.”
How often does she paint? “Don’t ask,” Maymuru-White deadpans. She protests that the AGNSW show, which will be followed by a solo exhibition at her gallery Sullivan+Strumpf in Sydney, will be her final exhibitions. The truth is Maymuru-White is proud of what she has produced and her role at Buku, where she oversaw the curation of the art centre’s museum in 1990. “I do a lot of hard work, really good work,” she says. “And now a lot of young artists are growing up, which is good. Giving other people a chance.” It’s been many years since she was in her homeland, Djarrakpi, three hours south of Yirrkala, where the cape spears the sea. She would like to go back soon.
“I could have been a bush girl,” she sighs, the glint in her eyes giving way to something softer.
It’s lunchtime now and the skies are threatening to open again. In a few hours, they will crack down the middle and turn the bark on the trees the colour of ash. Children are skittering outside, their hands covered in paint. (As Stubbs jokes: “Thirty years I’ve been running an art gallery with a creche inside.”) We watch them play. When Maymuru-White was in Venice, she found herself homesick. “I missed the grandkids,” she admits.
She has five of them, including Ngalakan Billy Waṉambi, aged 25, who recently joined ARIA Award-winning Yolŋu band King Stingray as lead singer. On didgeridoo is Dimithaya Burarrwaŋa, who is married to Munuy’ŋu Marika. Maymuru-White calls Marika out of the print studio to look at a picture of Billy as a child. The artist recently saw the men perform together on stage for the first time. “When I was watching them singing, their grandfathers appeared,” she says, beaming at Marika over her spectacles. She sees their ancestors in all her grandchildren: the connected kinship of what was once and is now and will be again. “Culture’s not gonna die. It will just continue,” she concludes. Just the other day, her youngest grandchild, only eight years old, began doodling. “Mother and I got surprised when she did the lines. On computer, mind you!” Maymuru-White grins, warmly. “And then she did the stars,” she adds, her eyes wide with delight. “‘Grandma! I did a good Milky Way!’”
Inside The Mulka Project, Djunmili Yunupingu cranks the volume and the studio explodes with all the sounds of the forest. Yunupingu, together with The Mulka Project’s creative director Ishmael Marika, are demonstrating Yalu (Nest) (2025), their work-in-progress light and sound installation, crafted alongside emerging artists Gutiŋarra Yunupiŋu and Dhukumul Waṉambi, set to take over the AGNSW’s Tank gallery for the opening of Yolŋu Power. The installation gives new meaning to the word immersive. As a cascade of LEDs lights up each column in the Tank, an all-encompassing soundscape transports you to East Arnhem Land, to the birds in the trees, the thunder in the sky, the rolling waves and the dancing fire. (“I put the mic right up to the flames,” Yunupingu says, laughing. “I thought it was gonna melt.”) Throughout, different Yolŋu artists, including Marika himself, sing the songlines of each landscape. The installation runs for about 19 minutes in an infinite loop. There is no start and no finish. Just the continuous cycle of life at the jagged edge of Arnhem Land.
The Mulka Project was established in 2007 to build a digital archive of images and video from Yolŋu history. Today, it still performs this vital work – when not producing the Yolŋu Power installation, Marika and Yunupingu bring Elders into the studio to record their songlines – while also engaging emerging digital artists. Gutiŋarra Yunupiŋu, a deaf artist, joined The Mulka Project in 2015, and his video installation showcasing Yolŋu sign language will be broadcast on the screen in the Naala Badu building’s main hall. He also worked on Yalu (Nest) (2025) with animation assistant Dhukumul Waṉambi. It was her idea, she says, for the installation to focus on the ebb and flow of the seasons. “All of what you see here is connected to us, to Yolŋu people,” she explains, as we sit in Buku’s sheltered courtyard watching the rain fall. “All the leaves, the trees, the sand, the water, the sky. It is actually connected to us.”
Dhukumul is the youngest daughter of the late Wukuṉ Waṉambi, cultural director of The Mulka Project, and an acclaimed Yolŋu artist. “Me and my siblings grew up watching him paint, and he taught us at a very young age,” Dhukumul remembers. “We grew up with art there, ready for us.” Her sister Gaypalani will also feature in Yolŋu Power. Like their father, Gaypalani works with found materials – discarded road signs and scrap metal – inscribing them with the symbols of their clan, from the silvery, slippery mullet to the buzzing honey bee. Her works are intricate and iridescent, like a piece of fine jewellery, and reveal the hand of a staggering talent. When their father died in 2022, both siblings stopped making art, and Dhukumul deferred her law degree to be with her family.
The sisters have now taken up their practice again. “We still have to carry that honour that our father taught us and gave to us,” Dhukumul explains. “We are carrying that knowledge so it doesn’t get lost. I’m proud my father was there telling us stories of our Country.”
When she was a child, she often sat with her father here at Buku or at home, on the verandah, as he worked. Dhukumul smiles at the memory. It reminds her of something. The other day her sister was painting on her own verandah, here in Yirrkala. Dhukumul lives across the street, so the artist took her young daughter to watch her sister at work, just as she once did with her father. “She got the brush and painted. She was doing the dots of the background,” Dhukumul says, a mix of wonder and pride. Eventually, the painting will depict honey bees, the Waṉambi clan totem, but first the foundation must be laid. And that’s what Dhukumul’s daughter did. “If we keep doing it, then our kids will have that talent of remembering the artwork and knowing what to do. And then they will pass it to their kids,” she says. “My daughter knows, and my sister’s daughter knows as well. They know what their grandfather did, what my father did. They’re the caretakers of my clan.”
Yolŋu Power: the art of Yirrkala is on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Naala Badu building from June 21.
This story is from the June issue of Vogue Australia.
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