What is Awelye? | Aboriginal Art Explained
Awelye is the Anmatyerre and Alyawarr word for women's ceremony in the Utopia region of Central Australia. It is also one of the best-known subjects in Utopia painting.
What is Awelye?
In Awelye ceremonies, women paint designs on one another's upper bodies with ochre before singing and dancing. The designs relate to particular Dreaming stories and to the country each woman belongs to. The ceremonies express women's responsibility for their country, its plants and animals, and the wellbeing of their community.
Much of what happens in Awelye is restricted to the women who take part. Paintings share the public side of the story: the body paint designs and the connection to country, not the ceremony itself.
The Paintings
Awelye paintings translate ceremonial body paint designs onto canvas. Bold, parallel and curving lines echo the marks painted across women's bodies, and many works also include the plants and bush foods tied to the artist's country.
Karen Bird Ngale and Awelye
Karen Bird Ngale is an Anmatyerre artist from the Utopia region, born in 1984. She is a daughter of Utopia artist Lindsay Bird Mpetyane, and she learned the songs, dances and stories connected with Awelye from senior women. Her paintings bring together women's ceremony, bush foods and bush medicine.
Janet Golder Kngwarreye, an Anmatyerre painter from Alhalkere (Boundary Bore) in Utopia, also paints Awelye as one of her core subjects.
To learn more, read our guides to the Dreaming and Aboriginal dot painting.
Browse Awelye paintings by Karen Bird Ngale and Janet Golder Kngwarreye.
Art by Farquhar is a member of the Aboriginal Art Association of Australia.