Jessie Pitjara Hunter was born in 1957 at MacDonald Downs and is the sister of renowned artists Sandy, Annie and Susan Pitjara Hunter. Her work has been collected by many significant public and private galleries and institutions. Jessie’s Dreaming is Awely (Body Paint). In her paintings, she symbolizes all that is associated with Awely – the decorated torsos of the women, the women’s ceremonial sites or dreaming places where women are gathered and the other representations of the ceremony – digging and music sticks, coolamons and feather adornments. Her paintings depict different body designs which are painted on the women’s breasts, arms and shoulders. She paints these designs from an aerial perspective.
The awelye ceremony begins with the women painting each others' bodies in designs relating to a particular women's dreaming and in accordance with their skin name and tribal hierarchy. The awelye designs represent a range of dreamings including animals and plants, healing and law. The designs are painted on the chest and shoulders using powders ground from ochre, charcoal and ash, applied with a flat padded stick or with the fingers in raw linear and curved lines. The act of decorating the body transforms the individual and changes their identity. During the painting, which can take up to three hours, the women chant their dreaming.
Exhibitions
1997 The Milky Way Dreaming, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London UK (reviewed: Culture & Cosmos, Volume 4 Number 1)
1985 Second National Aboriginal Art Award Exhibition, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin NT
1989 A Myriad of Dreaming: Twentieth Century Aboriginal Art, Westpac Gallery, Melbourne VIC
1988-89 Utopia Women's Paintings, the First Works on Canvas, A Summer Project, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney NSW
1990 Utopia - A Picture Story, an exhibition of 88 works on silk from the Holmes a Court Collection by Utopia artists which toured Eire and Scotland
2005 Black Ink: Indigenous Prints from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane QLD
2007 A Brush with Art, Eastern Desert Art Songs, Prairie Hotel, Parachilna
Collections
Batik: The Robert Holmes a Court Collection, WA
Queensland Art Gallery, QLD
Aboriginal Art Museum, The Netherlands
The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra ACT
