Draft:Lena Yarinkura

Lena Yarinkura is an Aboriginal Australian innovative artist from central Arnhem Land, and she primarily focused on pandanus weaving to create basketry and fibre sculptures. She was the first artist that used the weaving technique to make sculptural pieces such as animals. By parting from traditional fibre work, she became one of the first women from Arnhem Land to work with fibre sculpturally. Most of her works involve the complexity of modern contemporary and indigenous styles. Her experimentation with fiber works and paint changed the perception of fiber art to be seen as contemporary fine art instead of domestic work. Her artwork themes are various, including mythologies and various animals.

Early Life
Lena Yarinkura was born in 1961 at Maringrida, a community located around 250 miles east of Darwin on the Liverpool River in northeast Arnhem Land. Yarinkura was born into the Kune, Rembarrnga, and Burungku clans with the Yirritja moiety. She was the daughter of Lena Djamarrayku (1943-2005), a skilled weaver & artisan, and Willie Mardangiya. After Lena's father died when she was young, she was raised by her father's younger brother, Jack Wawee. She learned string-bag weaving, pandanus basketry, and dilly bags from her mother.

She tried to learn pandanus to make animals by herself. Some examples of her artwork include wyarra spirits, yawkyawks, Rainbow Serpent, camp dog, bandicoot, possum, wallaby, turtle, goanna, bush mouse, and stingray.

Career & Development
Her marriage with Bob Burruwal in the mid-1980s, she began to venture into bark painting and carving hollow log sculptures. With the change of media, she started a new approach to fibre by making traditional long yam sculptures from paperbark bounded by string, then painting them with red and white ochres. The materials used in her works are harvested from the local environment.

Towards the late 1980s, she began to make life-sized representations of ancestral cycles told by elders of western and central Arnhem Land. Lena frequently collaborates with her husband to work as a team. Together, they create figurative fiber art of animals and spirit figures. However, the innovations in the duo's work are mostly ascribed to Lena. Her innovations in using craft techniques to create figurative forms successfully allowed her to distinguish herself in the global market. In her woven animal sculptures, the bodies are made from pandanus and grass twined using techniques from basket weaving. By using traditional techniques to explore new forms of sculpture, she challenges traditional ideas about weaving. Lena also continues to influence and pass down important skills to younger artists in her community, including her daughters Yolande Rostron and Selina Brian.

Importance of Spider in Her Art

In Karrh kunred (Spider web) 2010 Yarinkura has crafted a spider on a web of string made from the roots of manworrbal (Cocky Apple tree), with karlba (yellow ochre) and ngarradj (white cockatoo feathers). A harbinger who heralds death or sickness, karrh (spider) belongs to the yirridjdja moiety, as do the materials the work is made from, sourced from Yarinkura’s clan estate. Karrh kunred weaves together the essence of Djarngo (religion)—it is from Country, of Country. Karrh is manifested as multiple physical, emotional, metaphysical and cultural expressions: as a rock near Buluhkadaru outstation (a sacred site) where karrh travelled, stopped and turned to stone; as a song sung by renowned singer Jacky Marrpuma; as a dance, with arm actions mimicking the quick legs of a spider weaving a web; as a living insect. It is a metaphor, a message and, in Yarinkura’s hand, an artwork.

Metal Work

Starting in 2000, Lena experimented crafting her sculptures with metal instead of fibre. Dogs were a common theme in her metal sculptures. She made her art based off of her dreams and a lot of her dreams were of her dogs. She would pass down stories of ancestral dogs, among others, to her daughter Yolanda. She feels especially attached to dogs because of their relation to her homeland, explaining “I make a lot of dogs, because the dog is my Dreaming. It’s important for me. A long time ago, there was a big dog, like a lion. This dog had a lot of power. He could change the shape of the country. One day this dog was looking for water, he had been running and running and was very thirsty. He ran up a hill on my country at Buluhkarduru and went into the jungle there, looking for water. He started to dig, but found nothing. He kept digging and digging until he disappeared. Today, you can see the hole he made. It’s still there. We know that dog is still there too. He watches over my country. He’ll bite you if you’re not careful. We call that hill Gordeme, which means Dog Dreaming.”

Significant Artwork
Two brothers and Modjarrkki the Crocodile 1994 & The Tragedy of Bulanj and Balang 1994

There are two Yarinkura’s installation artworks in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s collection tells a story. The first is Two brothers and Modjarrkki the Crocodile, 1994. It includes 2 male figures, female figure, dog and crocodile, and was made of paperbark, string and natural ochres. It recounts the tale of a crocodile hunt involving a man, his wife and the man’s unmarried brother. When the younger brother caught a crocodile underwater, he used a rope to bind its snout, and the crocodile broke loose and killed the husband. The younger brother took responsibility for the widow and married his dead brother’s wife.

The second installation is named The Tragedy of Bulanj and Balang and was also created in 1994. It includes 3 female figures, 2 male figures and 3 babies, and was made of paperbark, string and natural ochres. It tells the story of another man’s wife, whom he was forbidden to marry under customary law. He schemed to win her by offering to accompany her son Balang through his initiation ceremony. However, the boy died and, after many subterfuges, Bulanj was discovered with the white-ochred bones of the boy in a dilly bag. After a lengthy pursuit, the family eventually succeeded in the payback (revenge) killing of Bulanj for his crime.

Bulbbe 1985

It was made by Lena Yarinkura in the mid to late 1980s. This string bag and coil-woven basket – one a functional weaving, the other an ornamental object – represent two of the several types of weaving practised in Arnhem Land today. Connected to ancestral creation narratives and depicted in the rock art of the area, the djerrk or string bag is part of the oldest weaving tradition in Arnhem Land. Yarinkura’s djerrk hangs nearly 80 centimeters in length, as string bags are worn strapped to the body, designed for personal use and food collecting.2 Yarinkura explains: ‘The string bag is for carrying food like cycad nuts or fish or Ipomoea tubers. Those old people collected their food with these’.3 The simple loop stitch is made to be flexible and move as the bag’s contents grow. While Yarinkura’s djerrk is ‘traditional’ in the sense that it continues a long-held practice, the subtle bands of color are a more recent addition and set apart the work of contemporary weavers.

Ngalbenbe 2022

This is a fibre art piece created and designed by Lena with the help of her daughter Yolanda. It is an installation that showcases ancestral tales from Arnhem Land, depicted through pandanus and paperbark sculptures. The narrative follows the journey of three fishermen and their walabi fish trap, seeking the aid of Ngalbenbe, the sun, to overcome challenges. These stories reflect cultural values and practices, celebrating communal gatherings and the spiritual significance of the sun in Kune and Rembarrnga traditions.

Significant Exhibitions and Awards
In Australia:
 * Gungamuk: Kamarrang Burruwal and Lena Yarinkura, Sheahan Galleries, Thirroul, NSW (2010)
 * Ancestral Spirit Beings and Ceremonial Lorrkon, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne (2009)
 * Maningrida Survey, Short St Gallery, Broome (2008)
 * Spirit Beings, Lorrkon and Fibreworks, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne (2007)
 * Kamarrang Burruwal and Lena Yarinkura, Annandale Galleries, Sydney (2004)
 * Organic Forms in Fibre, Aboriginal & Pacific Art, Sydney (2003); Yvonne Koolmatrie and Lena Yarinkura, Aboriginal & Pacific Art, Sydney (2001)
 * Organic Forms, Aboriginal & Pacific Art, Sydney (1999)
 * The Language of Place, Framed Gallery, Darwin (1996)
 * Floating Life: Contemporary Aboriginal Fibre Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2009)
 * Australian Culture Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2004)
 * Maningrida Threads: Aboriginal Art from the Maningrida Collection, MCA, Sydney (2003)
 * Transition and Resilience, JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design, Adelaide (2002)
 * 12th Biennale of Sydney (2000)
 * pinifex Runner: A Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Fibre Art, Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery, Sydney (1999)

International Exhibitions
 * In the Heart of Arnhem Land: Myth and the Making of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Musée de l’Hôtel-Dieu, Mantes-la-Jolie, France (2001)

Quotes
Spider is from beginning. It’s my Dreaming. It’s the big brown one. It’s not really a new idea – for a long time people have painted the spider. When I do bark painting, I paint the spider. But then I thought, ‘Oh, I can make my string spider because when he goes round and round ...

But I like to keep changing, always new. Not same one. Just make different things because I have to change, change, change. I can’t just make one. No! Because I’ve got a lot of Dreamings.

No one taught me to use pandanus to make my animals. I have been teaching myself, I create new ways all the time. They are only my ideas … I pass my ideas on to my children and my grandchildren. It is important that I teach them, because one day I will be gone, and they will take my place

weaving, it can make you happy.