Woven into Practice: Tjanpi Desert Weavers

The Gallery is excited to launch the exhibition Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia on Saturday 29 July. To coincide with this exhibition, a selection of spectacular woven baskets made by the Tjanpi Desert Weavers are available to purchase from the Gallery shop, in store and online.

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Tjanpi Desert Weavers is a First Peoples social enterprise of the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council (NPYWC). Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands span approximately 350,000 square kilometres in the central desert region of Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.

Tjanpi (meaning grass in Pitjantjatjara language) began as an answer to the call of NPYWC members for more sustainable, culturally appropriate employment opportunities. In 1995, NPYWC member Thisbe Purich taught a group of local women to make woven basketry using tjanpi, a local grass, as the base. Facilitating the workshop over an afternoon, Purich initially thought the experiment had failed when the women instead made manguri, traditional hair rings used to carry objects on the head. A few days later, however, baskets appeared, growing out of the coiled bases of these traditional forms. From the outset, the Tjanpi weaving practice was a hybrid of existing and new methods.

Since then, Tjanpi has grown to encompass the contemporary fibre art and communal practice of over 400 Aṉangu/Yarnangu women artists from 26 remote Communities.[1] Tjanpi artists continue to use native grasses with seeds, feathers, commercially bought raffia (often dyed with native plants), string and colourful wool to weave large-scale collaborative fibre installations. From baskets to life-size figures of animals, people and objects, these works share their makers’ lore and scenes of daily living.

Kungkarangkalpa, the Seven Sisters, is an essential songline in the central and western deserts that recurs in several Tjanpi works. The story follows ancestral beings, the seven sisters, as they flee the unwanted pursuit of a man. The sisters leap into the skies to protect themselves, forming the Pleiades star cluster. Discussing the group’s 2013 Kungkarangkalpa work in a talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Pukatja artist Nyurpaya Kaika-Burton explained: ‘Nowadays there are so many different ways in which we transmit those anciennt stories because we really held those stories strong.’

Tjanpi practice encapsulates what Anishinaabe First Nations scholar Gerald Vizenor calls Indigenous ‘survivance’.[2] This term names the intersection of resistance and survival – it calls attention to the endurance of Indigenous communities in the face of settler colonialism, as well as the enrichment of culture in ever-expanding ways. It is a fact that British invaders denied Aboriginal people access to their culture, alongside carrying out physical genocide. As Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung artist and academic Tiriki Onus and Larrakia, Tiwi artist Eugenia Flynn note, one of the more subtle components of cultural genocide, or ethnocide, is the separation of ‘art’ and ‘craft’ as two distinct forms.[3] They explain that this division is one way that European dominance is exerted in Australia ‘by ensuring that the white-dominated Australian art sector continues to be the arbiter of what constitutes art and what does not’.[4]

In the lifeworlds of the First Peoples of Australia there are no distinctions between art and craft. Weaving, making tools, dancing, singing, and painting on rock or the body are all practices from a singular creative pool. Art is a way of life. It is as much about function as it is about beauty, form and storytelling. In opposition to ‘art’, the idea of ‘craft’ has long been wielded as a denigrating term in art histories. Just as this idea is used to marginalise Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and other cultural groups, ‘craft’ is generally used to denote the domain and work of women. ‘When craft is synonymous with cultural works and female practice, it inherently but wrongly asserts that contemporary Australian art is the domain of white men.’[5] The Tjanpi Desert Weavers dispel this fabrication.

 

While collecting tjanpi, women can spend time on Country and maintain their culture by gathering food, hunting, performing inma (cultural song and dance) and teaching their children. The shared stories, skills and experiences of this wide-reaching network of mothers, daughters, aunties, sisters and grandmothers form the bloodline of the desert weaving practice.

Sculptures produced as part of this legacy are not just made on Country, but of it. As Jennifer Biddle explains, Tjanpi art serves ‘to reactivate binding relationships between country, people and place in a context where such relationships [and] perceptual experiences . . . are precisely what is most at-risk today.’[6] The significance of living on Country, and having unrestricted access to it, is a critical factor in Aboriginal health and well-being.

Just as the Tjanpi Desert Weavers are innovators of fibre-based sculpture, they are also shifting how the art world perceives First Peoples’ art. Their work is now sold online and by stockists throughout Australasia. New projects are exhibited in their public gallery in Mparntwe /Alice Springs, and installations are in the holdings of national and international art collections. In 2015, a collaborative work featured as part of Fiona Hall’s installation Wrong Way Time at the Australian Pavillion at the Venice Biennale.

The collaborative efforts of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers re-engage cultural practices that settler colonialism sought to eradicate. Nearing its third decade, Tjanpi has become fundamental to Central and Western Desert culture and is born of cross-cultural exchange. Tjanpi weaving innovatively threads techniques handed down through generations with the fabric of the makers’ lived experiences in the 21st century. The resulting artistic forms grow skills, knowledge, and practical tools to survive and, more importantly, to thrive. Tjanpi weaving embodies the energies and rhythms of Country, culture and community: these women and their work are physical manifestations of survivance.

A selection of spectacular woven baskets made by the Tjanpi Desert Weavers are available to purchase from the Gallery shop, in store and online.

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[1] The term Aṉangu refers to people of the APY (Aṉangu Pitjantjajara Yankunytjajara) lands, whereas Yarnangu refers to people of the Ngaanyatjarra lands. See Jennifer L Biddle, ‘Tjanpi Desert Weavers and the Art of Indigenous Survivance’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol 34, no 102, 2009, pp 413–36, DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2019.1697179, p 432.

[2] Gerald Vizenor, Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2008.

[3] Onus Tiriki, and Eugenia Flynn, The Tjanpi Desert Weavers Show Us that Traditional Craft is Art’, The Conversation, University of Melbourne, 13 August 2014, https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/news/3605-the-tjanpi-desert-weavers-show-us-that-traditional-craft-is-art.

[4] As above.

[5] As above. 

[6] Biddle, ‘Tjanpi Desert Weavers and the Art of Indigenous Survivance’, pp 431–32.