1954–present
Yilpi Adamson
Imiyari “Yilpi” Adamson (born 1954) grew up at the Ernabella mission in the northwest of South Australia and began there with batik. She wove baskets from tjanpi, desert grass, and later took up painting; her most successful works are those about her childhood at Ernabella in the 1950s. Her work is in museums in Australia and Scotland.
Biography
Yilpi Adamson devoted her best-known series of paintings not to a legend or a landscape but to her own childhood: Ernabella in the 1950s, as a little girl saw it.
She was born in 1954 at a place near Uluru, in the Northern Territory. Her mother was a member of the Pitjantjatjara people and her father was Yankunytjatjara. When she was very small she was brought to Ernabella, a Presbyterian mission in northwest South Australia, where she grew up and later began working at Ernabella Arts, the art centre of the settlement. Batik was one of the first techniques she learned there. In 2006 several of her works were shown at an exhibition in Adelaide, and one of them was bought for the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Later her batiks were also acquired by the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Alongside this she made baskets and other objects from tjanpi, desert grass, some of them with a women’s project, the Tjanpi Desert Weavers. Sculpture and knitting are also listed among her kinds of work, but the materials available to me give no details of these.
She came to painting noticeably later. She painted both abstract and figurative works. The abstract ones express Dreamtime stories (Tjukurpa), which were passed down to her by her mother. The figurative ones deal with the life of a child at the mission, and, to my mind, it is these that speak most concretely about her experience.
Adamson’s paintings are held by the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Museum of Australia, and several works are in the National Gallery of Victoria. The National Gallery of Australia has a series of ceramic pots that she painted together with Malpiya Davey, Alison Carroll and other Ernabella women.
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