Title

Nelson, Michael Jagamara.

Author

Australian Art Print Network.

Source

[Not applicable]

Publication date

2001

Type

Biography

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Michael Neslon Jagamara

Born around 1946 at Pikily west of Yuendemu, in Central Australia, Michael Neslon Jagamara grew up in the bush and remembers hiding in fear at his first sight of white men at Mt Doreen station. He is a senior Warlpiri tribesman and custodian of many Dreaming stories. He believes it is his responsibility to preserve, in paint and print, the stories which can assist the teaching of others about his tradition and culture.

He lived at Haasts Bluff until his parents took him to the mission school at Yuendemu for a European education. He left school at thirteen, after initiation, and worked at buffalo shooting, driving trucks, droving cattle and in the army, before returning to Yuendemu and then settling at Papunya in 1976. In Papunya he observed the work of older artists and by 1983 he had began to paint regularly. He paints Possum, Snake, Two Kangaroos, Flying Ant and Yam Dreamings from the area around Piklyi as well as lightning, rain, shields and sacred sites.

Jagamara displayed an intuitive response to colour symmetry and design. He gradually developed an ‘infill’ technique where fields of colour transformed the canvas into a coherent image without an obvious foreground or background. He paints several Dreaming stories on a single work: “I thought to myself – I’ll do different way to them mob instead of copying them. Do my own way.”

In 1984 he won the National Aboriginal Art Award; in 1986 he exhibited in the Biennale of Sydney and was included in The State of the Art, a British art documentary.

In 1987 a 8.2 metre painting by Nelson was installed in the foyer of the Sydney Opera House and he is also the designer of the 196 square metre mosaic in the forecourt of the new National Parliament building. His 1985 painting Five Stories was one of the most reproduced works of Australian art of the 1980s and appears on the cover of the catalogue of the Asia Society’s Dreamings exhibition which toured the USA in 1988-90. In 1989 he had his first solo exhibition, followed by shows in 1990 and 1993. In 1993 he received the Order of Australia Medal for services to Aboriginal art, and in 1994 he received a Fellowship from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council.

In 1998 his painting career took a remarkable turn with the production of extraordinary modernist works belonging to the New Expressions series. After years of painting in a classical tradition of heavily worked canvases with dots, bands, circles and a modified palette, the painting surface suddenly exploded into a carnival of raw colour, gesture and action. These works are more than an liberation of brushstroke, they are codes to a repertoire of complex ceremonial ground and body designs and dreaming stories.

Biography courtesy of The Australian Art Print Network, 2001.
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