Context (CMS Context)
Presented by The Art Fund and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. An acquisition project to build a collection of modern and contemporary work on paper from Australia, Canada and South Africa was undertaken over 2011-13 with the support of a grant under The Art Fund's RENEW programme. The collection was developed with the expert advice and generous assistance of Annie Coombes and Norman Vorano in relation to South African and Inuit artists respectively. Khadija Carroll, Anita Herle and Diana Wood Conroy also contributed to the selection process. Obtained from the Australian Print Workshop. Address: 210 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, Victoria 3065, PO Box 1236, Collingwood. Victoria 3066, P: 0394195466
E: auspw@bigpond.com
www.australianprintworkshop.com
Print sent to the UK on 18/05/2012.

Event Date 14/8/2012
Author: maa

Description (CMS Description)
Limited edition print titled 'Guion Guion #1'. Printed on white paper. Two elongated female figures in black ink set against a light coloured background. The women are adorned with arm and leg ornaments. Both wear skirts. The left figure also displays a hair ornament.
The print is signed in pencil with 'Gina. K.' Handwritten in pencil in the left hand corner of the print is '9/21'. A watermark 'APW' is visible in the bottom right hand corner through which in a 90 degree vertical angle the words 'arches france' followed by an infinity symbol can be distinguished. Condition: very good.

Event Date 14/8/2012
Author: maa

Context (CMS Context)
Regina Karadada is a member of an important family of artists of the far northern Kimberley region, renowned for their paintings of Wandjina figures, a distinctive genre with great round faces, surrounded by a kind of halo, famous in the rock art of the area.


Her work is distinctive in that although it is similarly inspired by rock art, she presents images of a different kind, known as guion guion, commonly elongated figures that seem to bear elaborate head-dresses or wigs, and that carry ornaments, sticks, bags or weapons. These figures, known also as Bradshaws (after one of the locations in which they were studied by archaeologists) have been enormously controversial among archaeologists and ethnographers of Aboriginal art, some having argued that they are so stylistically distinctive that they must have been created by a distinctive, prehistoric, non-Aboriginal population. Though this view is not widely accepted today, it exemplifies longstanding arguments about rock arts that were formerly considered 'too sophisticated' to have been produced by the indigenous populations. Karadada's family and community are remote from the cities and institutions in which these debates took place; there is no issue for her; the imagery, though millenia old, is part of the living ancestral tradition of her people. Purchased from the Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, and presented in 2013 by the Art Fund (£375) and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. Details taken from the Art Fund website, 9/5/2013
Event Date 9/5/2013
Author: Rachel Hand