IRRETYE, TAPATJATJAKA (WEDGE-TAILED EAGLE STORY AT TITJIKALA
Much like her peers at Tangentyere Artists, Doris Thomas paints animated compositions saturated in colour. The translation of cultural stories passed on through language onto canvas further distills the sense of cultural mythos that exists in the work of Thomas, a Luritja artist now aged in her seventies.
Irretye, Tapatjatjaka (Wedge-tailed eagle story at Titjikala) tells a story that was passed on to her by her grandmother and echoes across many of her paintings. This narrative is about a boy taken from his mother and carried into the sky by a white wedge-tailed eagle. Thomas’s repeated reference in her work to the boy and eagle, bound together and soaring above land, conjures the idea that they act as an emblem, a form of cultural symbolism. Both seem otherworldly, evoking a sense of mystery and contemplation – what do they represent?
There is an unquestionable relationship between lived experience and collective memory, one that is reflected in Thomas’s art. It is important to Thomas that this eagle story is passed on from her grandmother to future generations, expressing that ‘this dreaming story she has told me, she asked me to pass it on’.
While the story of Irretye, Tapatjatjaka (Wedge-tailed eagle story at Titjikala) is specific to the Titjikala Community, located near Thomas’s birth place and intrinsic to the meaning in her work, we can all engage with it, regardless of where we are from. The bold colours that energise the surface of Thomas’s paintings also activate the imagination, searing desert scenes into our mind. Furthermore, Irretye, Tapatjatjaka blurs the line between the lived and spiritual world, asking us to ponder: what does it mean to inherit stories from our ancestors?
Kirra Weingarth
Thank you to AGSA and Tarnanthi