Lunchtime Art Bite: 30 April 2026

For our second Art Bite of 2026 our group met in the foyer of the Research School of Social Sciences. Here we discussed a dynamic range of works by outstanding Australian women artists, including painters Angelina Pwerle Ngala (Anmattyer and Alyawarr), Dorothy Napangardi Robinson (Walpiri language group), and Tjawina Porter Nampitjinpa (Ngaatjatjarra language group), and sculptor Jan King. The text here expands on the histories and works of Jan King and Angelina Pwerle Ngala. More information on each artist is easily accessible online.

Jan King (b. Cunnamulla QLD, 1945) Monastery, 2006. hot zinc sprayed and painted steel, 198 x 110 x 70 cm. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by the artist, 2018. ANU Art Collection.

Jan King is one of the most accomplished sculptors working in steel in Australia today.  In 2018 sculptor King generously donated her dynamically lyrical Monastery to the ANU Art Collection as part of the Australian Cultural Gifts Program. Visitors to the Drill Hall Gallery enjoyed Monastery for some years, and in 2021 it was moved to the new Research School of Social Sciences building, along with other landmark works from the ANU Art Collection.

King’s generous gift to the ANU is a fine example of formalist abstraction speaking in a language of line, volume, space, rhythm, and structure. Of her materials, King has said “Working primarily with steel it is the tensile strength and flexibility of the material that I value. I can make a light and open structure using space as an element, literally drawing in space, with steel, while still maintaining a structural strength.”

Following her graduation from National Art School in the early 1970s, King received an Australia Council Visual Arts Board Grant to study at the New York Studio School in 1979. In 1994 she received an Art Omi Creative Grant and in 2002 won the Woollahra Sculpture Prize. Since 1976 King has exhibited consistently in group shows, both commercially and in public institutions in Australia, Japan, the US and Korea. She has had 17 solo exhibitions including a survey exhibition at Defiance Gallery, Sydney 2018. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections including Artbank, Macquarie University, Australian National University and the University of Technology Sydney.

King is known for her sculptures made from waxed and painted steel, a material she exploits to its full potential, creating elegant lyrical and fluid works that contradict our expectations of this material.

“One of the captivating things about Jan King’s sculptures is that they present themselves to us as drawings – drawings in three dimensions. Her largest sculptures, in particular, seem to be executed with effortless ease and accuracy – they are just about as beautiful as drawing in our time can decently aspire to be. Yet the impression we receive of physical verve, spontaneity, suppleness and susceptibility to nuance is due to an illusion she contrives.” – Terence Maloon

“Monastery” alludes to the similarly titled painting by Ian Fairweather. [OC1] It captures the calligraphically inspired gesture of that painting and indeed mimics the painting’s dignified graceful quietitude. It is a very fine and representative work by the artist.

Monastery featured in the 2011 Drill Hall exhibition ‘Abstraction’, curated by Terence Maloon and Paul Selwood, alongside works by Michael Buzacott, Virginia Coverntry, Paul Hopmeier, Roy Jackson, Allan Mitelman, John Peart, James Rogers, Paul Selwood and Aida Tomescu.

Angelina Pwerle Ngala, (Alhalkere country (Utopia Station), Northern Territory, 1947), Bush Plum, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 183.5 x 174.5 x 3 cm. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Annette Reeves and Bill Nuttall.

Angelina Pwerle Ngale is a senior Anmattyer and Alyawarr woman living and working in the Utopia homelands northwest of Alice Springs. Pwerle’s art is infused with the rich cultural knowledge of her Country and Altyerr (Dreaming).

Pwerle started making art in the 1980s as part of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group, and though she was one of the youngest participants, she demonstrated a refined and captivating personal style. Experience painting in ceremonial contexts (including applying body paint for women’s business) informed the more contemporary art of Anmattyer artists, who began producing incredibly fine and sophisticated work soon after the introduction of acrylic paints to the Utopia artists in the summer of 1988-89.

Pwerle’s most common subjects are anwekety (bush plum), athem-areny (little spirit people), and women’s ceremonies. Bush Plum (1997) is characteristic of the artist’s style, comprised of a large-scale dark background populated with intense and varying concentrations of miniscule pale dots.

Dots have many different functions in Indigenous art and there are great regional and stylistic variations in their application. In this work, the scattering of different-coloured dots alludes to the lifecycle of the plant, as it changes from germinating seed, to flower, to fruit and then dies off, before repeating the cycle with the next rain. The speckled composition also alludes to the paths of the bush plum seeds that are blown across the country by the Dreamtime winds, and the tracks of the women collecting bush plum for food and keeping its Altyerr story.

Bush foods and flowers are common subjects in the work of women artists from the Central Desert region, as women typically gather bush foods and are responsible for caring for the Altyerr associated with them. Anwekety are shrubs of the Central Desert region that flower with small white blooms after rain and produce small olive-like fruits, which are eaten fresh, preserved and dried, or roasted and ground into a paste. They are an essential traditional food for the Anmattyer people and are an important part of the Altyerr story particular to the sacred site of Ahalper — Pwerle’s patrilineal country. Hence, the work speaks to both the physical sustenance and spiritual nourishment of anwekety.

Pwerle’s practice of stippling using a wooden skewer dipped in thick acrylic paint and dotted onto canvas gives a sense of both intimate closeness and detail, and the vastness of the cosmos. The fine, almost fastidious dotting of Pwerle’s work gives it a shimmering, mesmerising appearance, hinting at the subterranean presence of ancestral knowledge and power just below the surface. Bush Plum’s topography is both real and mythical, abstracted and based in reality. The power emanating from the canvas attests to the strength of ancestral power resonating across the Utopia landscape. Pwerle’s work is a meditative reflection of her Country and knowledge, of the plants, animals and earth which make up Altyerr.

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