Eileen Yaritja Stevens was born circa 1915-19 and was raised in the remote Western Desert of Australia, where she lived until she passed away in early 2008. The child of a Yankunytjatjara father and Ngaanyatjarra mother, Stevens described herself as belonging 'in the middle’, a Pitjatjantjara woman.
Born in Makiri, to the south of Nyapari, where she spent the final years of her life (returning from time to time to visit her birthplace), Stevens is acknowledged as one of the most significant contemporary Pitjatjantjara artists. Located on the back road between Watarru and Fregon in South Australia, Makiri is an important Minyma Tjala Tjukurpa (Ancestral Honey Ant Women Dreaming) site. In her artworks Stevens depicted the Tjukurpa (Dreamings) associated with this site along with Tjukurpa relating to a Wanampi (Rainbow Snake Ancestral Men) site located at Piltati.
Stevens’ early childhood upbringing in the bush at Makiri was followed by what she called 'Mission Days’. As a young woman Stevens worked at the Presbyterian mission of Ernabella, milking goats. (Ernabella was later frequently referred to by its Pitjatjantjara name, Pukatja). According to the artist, mission life was tough but rewarding. Reflecting back on those days, Eileen Yaritja Stevens asserted, with a characteristic absence of self-pity, sentimentality, or false modesty that she was always “...a hard worker at the mission, but it was good” (Stevens, Pers. Comm. 2007).
It was there, at Ernabella, that she met her late husband, who worked chopping trees for use in building projects. Following an extended stay at Ernabella, Stevens accompanied her husband to his country, Nyapari, where she lived until her death in February 2008. Indeed, Stevens was regarded by many of her countrymen and women as the heart and soul of Nyapari, despite the fact that it was country that she had 'adopted’ through her husband (although it was very close, in fact virtually adjacent to, her own natal Dreaming country).
After the death of her husband, Stevens and one of her countrywomen and fellow high-profile artist, Wingu Tingima, were to become virtually inseparable companions, staying together in Nyapari for extended periods and also accompanying each other to attend their art exhibition openings. In many respects they complemented one another: while Stevens was forthright and outspoken, Wingu Tingima, who survives her dear friend and misses her greatly, is a diminutive, reserved, more inward-looking woman. Their kinship relationship and enduring friendship was reinforced by the fact that Stevens’ daughter, Yaritja Stevens, married Wingu Tingima’s son, Winmati Roberts, and therefore they shared grandchildren.
No shrinking violet even in her advancing years, Stevens was a forceful, larger than life character. Physically, she had enormous presence: her rather piratic air was reinforced by the fact that she frequently sported a black eye-patch. Eloquent and somewhat regal, she had a splendid sense of humour and a wonderful laugh to accompany it. Refusing to speak English, she would communicate only in her natal tongue, Pitjatjantjara. Excoriatingly intelligent, feisty, determined, strong-minded and definite in her views, Stevens possessed the immense self-confidence of a person who was assured of her place in the world and in the overall scheme of things.
Stevens came to painting with acrylics on canvas late in life. In 2004 she began working for Ninuku Artists, a pilot visual arts project administered from Adelaide and Kalka, servicing five small communities in the Western Pitjatjantjara Lands. Ninuku Arts continued throughout 2004 and 2005, however by 2006 it had evolved into the Tjungu Palya Collective, and was beginning to attract a number of male artists who joined its core of women artists.
After Ninuku Arts was disbanded, Stevens continued to paint for the Tjungu Palya Art Centre, which caters predominantly for artists living in the small communities of Nyapari, Kanpi and Watarru, and the outstations of Angatja, Umpukulu and Tjankanu, from its incorporation in 2006 until her death in early 2008. During those years she gradually raised her profile by exhibiting her works in group exhibitions in various metropolitan centres.
In October 2007, Melbourne’s Vivien Anderson Gallery hosted the, by then nonagenarian, artist’s first solo exhibition titled 'EILEEN YARITJA STEVENS: MINYMA KUTJU – ONE WOMAN’. Stevens was an instrumental player in the remarkable late blooming of the Pitjatjantjara/ Yankunytjatjara artists of northern South Australia, and is one of only a handful of those artists to have held a solo exhibition.
In her first, and what was to be her only, solo exhibition, held less than a year before her death, it could be said that Stevens arrived as an artist. Bearing in mind that she was already well into her eighties when she conducted her first successful assault on the art world, she was phenomenally successful as an artist. This was an extraordinary achievement, considering the significant barriers constituted by her age, gender, language, remote location and relative powerlessness vis-à-vis the dominant Australian culture.
Stevens’ admirably strong personal traits are reflected in her powerful artworks. Audacious, gestural and rapturously expressive in their use of colour, Stevens’ works presented a fresh way of 'seeing country’. The body of work that made up her solo show comprised acrylics on canvas, all of which were variants on the subject of her major Tjukurpa ('Dreaming’), relating to events that unfolded at Piltati. Evocative rather than descriptive, these works suggested visceral enjoyment in their making.
In these works, Stevens depicted ancestral events that unfolded at the Piltati site near her birthplace, on her late husband’s country. The fact that the Tjukurpa ('Dreaming’) painted by Stevens (with seemingly infinite variations on the same basic theme) is located at Piltati, a place in Australia’s remote north that boasts permanent, clean, pure drinking water, is not accidental. The location of precious water in this small desert-oasis is central to the subject matter in the suite of Piltati works depicted by this artist. The main thrust of the Dreaming narrative relating to the Piltati site is the behaviour of the waterhole’s self-appointed Rainbow Serpent guardian-protectors in safeguarding what they regard as 'their’ water sources. The narrative also incorporates important information about the nature of appropriate gender relations.
In these works the artist reveals the specific physical terrain that she referred to as her 'country’ as a kind of stage – a gloriously messy, wonderfully busy stage. Eileen Yaritja Stevens’ 'stage’ is peopled by an Ancestral cast of characters, some of whom are upright and moral, while others are villains, crooks and tricksters with an uncanny ability for morphing into different forms and species and back again into humans.
That Stevens conceived her epics in dramatically visual terms crystallizes their intensity. In her artwork the full range of Ancestral and human activity and behaviour can be observed. Played out against a background of intricate, scaffolding sites that are theatrically intertwined and interconnected, the dramas that unfold upon the stage that is Stevens’ 'country’ relate to the foundational Piltati story of two brothers who were married to two sisters.
These two Ancestral Men are, in fact, classic Indigenous 'trickster’ figures. Monstrous and exceedingly dangerous, Wanampi (Rainbow Serpents or Rainbow Snakes) are said to have the capacity to manifest themselves on the earth not only in human form but also to make themselves invisible, living in waterholes and rockholes and jealously, perhaps greedily cosseting those prized water sources (Stevens, Pers. Comm. 2007). The two Wanampi brothers, portrayed so vividly by Stevens, are said to still be living in the rockhole at Piltati. Told in Yaritja’s own words:
... The Piltati story is of Wati Kutjara ('Two Men’), [and] Minyma Kutjara ('Two Women’). Kangkuru malanypa Nyapari Tjukurpa. [This is the Nyapari story of a big sister and her younger sister]. The men are not really men, but Wanampi [Watersnakes]. These two brothers are married to the two sisters. The men are always sitting around having inma [ceremonies] and the women get angry that they are always having to work hard to get all the food. The women, the eldest [of whom is called] Wanyinta and the younger [whose name is] Alartjatjarra, have to go further and further away in search of food. They are digging for kuka mitika [burrowing bettong], irititja kuka [food from the olden times – in this instance it is specified that the food is meat or edible animal].
Wati kutjara nyinanyi kunkunpa. [The two men are sitting down sleeping]. They have been painting inside the cave. When they wake up they start looking for the two women. They turn into Wanampi to trick the women and hide in the hole the women have been digging. There is a lot of story for this place. Important story. Piltati rockhole. This is my husband’s country.
The narratives relating to these Ancestral Men behaving badly and their originary deception, sloth, and exploitation of women during the Tjukurpa possess all the elements of high drama. In other sequences of the same narrative the sisters retaliate by eating all the food that they have collected without sharing any with their husbands. In response, the two Snake Brothers not only become extremely 'snaky’ towards their wives but also demonstrate their cannibalistic propensities by swiftly devouring the two girls to whom they are married.
Stevens captured the tense and gripping events of these unfolding narratives in her numerous splendid Piltati works. In Piltati (2007), for example, she portrayed the women’s travels across country pursued by the suggestively sinuous bodies of the Ancestral Snake Brothers. Stevens’ use of colour to evoke a sense of movement across the desert is evident in all of her artworks.
Stevens’ artistic renditions of the Tjukurpa located at Piltati are unfettered by the primary school 'virtues’ of neatness or palette limitation. In Piltati Tjukurpa (2007), for example, Stevens confounded the 'Colour Nazis’ (the 'blue and green should never be seen’ brigade) by juxtaposing bright green, purple, blue and yellow brushwork.
Steven’s ability to conjure up movement by combining colour with forceful brushstrokes was also evident in her Minyma Kutjara (Two Ancestral Women) suite of works, also displayed in her solo and other exhibitions. Here, in one location, we see the two sisters, Wanyinta and Alartjatjarra, heading south in pursuit of potentially 'good’ or productive sites to dig for burrowing bettong. The latter are represented in their burrows. Wanyinta munu Alartjatjarra (2007) (Wanyinta and Alartjatjarra 2007) represents the two sisters digging for food in this early, innocent phase of their married lives, unaware of their husbands’ treacherous natures. At this stage they were loyal to their lazy husbands; two dutiful young wives who were working hard to feed and care for their men.
At a nearby site, depicted in the work Minyma Kutjara munu Wati Kutjara (Two Women and Two Men), the same two sisters are portrayed at a later time, sitting down in their shelter, tired and truculent after a hard day’s digging for small game, feeling unappreciated by their lazy, greedy husbands, who, still unbeknownst to them, were ogre snake-men with the self-transforming powers of sorcerers. In contemporary parlance, the two sisters were by this time well and truly 'over’ their husbands’ indolence and the lack of reciprocity that characterized their relationships with their young, hardworking wives. A deep irony resides in this work, however, because the worst is yet to come. These two men, their trusted husbands, would eventually take the young sisters’ lives. The story culminates in the two Snake Brothers eventually killing their two young wives as a result of preceding events. The Dreaming narrative that underpins these works is thus suffused with a betrayal of epic proportions and a tragic loss of life.
Stevens’ work has a graphic immediacy underscored by narrative power, distinguishing it from the apparently descriptive nature of a good deal of contemporary Aboriginal art. At the same time, Stevens conveyed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the terrain of her ancestral homelands, and the narratives relating to her own and her late husband’s country. Above all, in her artworks Stevens expressed a palpable, living relationship with country.
Throughout the course of her very long life, Eileen Yaritja Stevens experienced events and changes the magnitude of which most of us will never experience. Her artworks, unfathomable to some, except in terms of their visual properties, are reflections of this extraordinary life.
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