Pitjantjatjara artist from Western Australia, Noli Rictor, has won the prestigious $100,000 Telstra Art Award for a vibrant painting of the country he was born into, titled “Kamanti. Photograph courtesy of NATSIAA. Seven winners of the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) have been announced in Darwin, with Indigenous artists from around Australia taking home a combined $190,000 in prize money.
The winning works will be on display in the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) until January 2025. Many of the 72 final works in the exhibition – selected from 238 entries – show deep spiritual and cultural connection to the land, history and stories of First Nations people, with themes such as climate change, trauma and racism portrayed in many works.
Pitjantjatjara man and artist from Tjuntjuntjara in Western Australia, Noli Rictor, won the prestigious $100,000 Telstra Art Award for a vibrant painting of the country he was born into – traditional Spinifex Lands – titled “Kamanti”. Rictor says he is very proud of his country which he called “deceivingly beautiful country, with white marble gums that grow out of red sand dunes”. The award helps cement his practice as an artist, he says.
Six category awards, each valued at $15,000, are also awarded each year. The Telstra General Painting Award went to Mangala woman Lydia Balbal who lives in Bidyadanga/Broome, Western Australia. “Keeping up with the Balbals” was painted on a steel car bonnet and depicts Balbal’s homelands and the distances Aboriginal people need to travel in today’s world.
The decision to paint a story of her Country atop the bonnet of a vehicle was celebrated by the judges. “The many facets of the bonnet capture then omit shades of pastel greens, blues and creams and evoke scenes of families travelling between sites on their homelands,” the judges said.
Other winners used their art to depict traumatic recent and historical events. “An Australian Landscape”, a photograph taken by Brisbane-based artist Shannon Brett, who won the Telstra Work on Paper Award, depicts a shocking and violent racist crime: an ambiguous asphalt roadside in Cape York defaced with racist taunts and symbols.
Brett says she always stops at this location, which she calls “beautiful and peaceful and a place that’s really important to me” when driving from Brisbane to Cape York. “So on a four-day journey, driving, and just hours away from my destination, I’m confronted with this.”
A descendant of the Wakka Wakka, Butchulla and Gurang Gurang peoples of southern Queensland, Brett says she was overwhelmed. “We need to talk about racism in Australia,” she says. “This is so seriously violent. Why is this happening? They have so much hate in their hearts to produce this kind of message.
“We’re all dealing with something, but I think the First Nations people, we’re dealing with a whole other series of issues in terms of the kind of hate we’re subjected to just going about our daily lives. It’s so ridiculous and exhausting.”
Josina Pumani’s winning clay pot tells the story of Maralinga in the remote north of South Australia – the site of British nuclear tests in the mid-1950s. A first-time entrant, she won the Telstra Emerging Artist Award.
The hand-built form is bulbous at the top representing the cloud and winds of the nuclear explosion with rich black representative of the cloud and fall out and the red interior indicative of danger, heat and warning. Patterns on the outside of the pot represent the Aṉangu people.
“This is the story of my families, my uncle and the bad smoke that came and did damage to my people,” says Pumani. “I used to have this pain inside me and now it is released with my work.”
Natalie Davey also found the practice of making her art healing. She took home The Telstra Multimedia Award for her 10 minute video and a work on paper depicting the flooding event at Fitzroy Crossing in December 2022.
“I was in disbelief as I filmed and did so to double check it was all real,” she says. “Family has passed down stories reaching back to when a star fell in the desert; however, we did not have any references to guide us through this flood. Our entire community was affected; mine is one story among many.’
Wurrandan Marawili won the Telstra Bark Painting Award for “Rumbal, the body/the truth”, and Obed Namirrkki took home the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award (Sponsored by Telstra) for “Kunkurra”, a work about the spiralling wind. Highly Commended awards went to Dhukumul Wanambi, Milminyina Dhamarrandji, Bugai Whyoulter, Julieanne Gitjpulu Malibirr and Nancy Long and Rene Long Nungarrayi.
