Jeannie Mills Pwerle: Painting the Bush Yam
Jeannie Mills Pwerle is an Alyawarre woman from the Utopia region of Central Australia, born in 1965 in the Atnwengerrp region. For more than 30 years she has painted one subject, the Bush Yam from her father's Country at Irrwelty, and she has made it completely her own.
Utopia
The Utopia Homelands sit north-east of Alice Springs, on the traditional lands of the Anmatyerre and Alyawarre people. Art at Utopia started with batik on silk in the late 1970s, and in 1988 the artists were introduced to canvas and acrylic paint.
Jeannie was there at the start. Over the summer of 1988 to 1989, a group of Utopia women painted their first works on canvas, and the project was shown as Utopia Women's Paintings, the First Works on Canvas, A Summer Project. Jeannie was one of those painters. It was a turning point for Utopia art, and for her.
Family
Jeannie's mother is the artist Dolly Mills, and her late uncle Greeny Purvis Petyarre was a respected elder in the community. Greeny Purvis is also family to Janet Golder Kngwarreye, another Utopia artist we work with, and a sign of how closely the painting families of Utopia are tied together.
The Bush Yam
Jeannie paints Anaty, the Bush Yam, also known as the Pencil Yam. It's a long tuber dug from the ground across the Utopia homelands and a highly valued traditional food.
Her paintings break the plant into its parts. The thick, brushed segments of colour are the yam's flowers and roots, and the fine dots between them, usually white, are its seeds. Each segment can carry two or three colours at once, and a large canvas holds hundreds of them, laid out in rows that ripple across the surface.
From a distance the paintings read as shimmering fields of colour. Up close you can follow every single stroke.
What she has achieved
Jeannie's work is held in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and in the Holmes ร Court Collection in Perth. She was a finalist in the 25th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2008, and has exhibited across Australia and in the United States since the early 1990s.
"Yam Dreaming" Jeannie Mills Pwerle 205cm x 152cm
The biggest of her paintings we hold. Pinks, blues, greens and golds running through every row, with nothing in the palette left out.
"Yam Dreaming" Jeannie Mills Pwerle 213cm x 104cm
Warmer. Oranges, pinks and greens moving in waves along more than two metres of canvas.
"Yam Dreaming" Jeannie Mills Pwerle 212cm x 105cm
A softer palette of olive, lilac, pale blue and yellow. Calm, and it suits a room with natural timber and linen.
"Yam Dreaming" Jeannie Mills Pwerle 210cm x 88cm
Bright and full of light. Yellows, greens, teals and pinks in a long format made for over a sofa or a bed.
"Yam Dreaming" Jeannie Mills Pwerle 150cm x 97cm
Plum, raspberry and mauve with touches of gold. The richest, deepest colouring in the group.
"Yam Dreaming" Jeannie Mills Pwerle 199cm x 70cm
Blues and lilacs with a little pink coming through. Long and narrow, so it works in a hallway or above a sideboard.
If you're in Adelaide, come and see Jeannie's work in person at the gallery at 1070 South Road, Edwardstown. The way her colours shift as you move past a painting doesn't come through on a screen.