Barbara Skinner, Aboriginal Artist

Barbara Skinner is an emerging Alyawarre artist from the expansive Aboriginal homelands region of Utopia, some 240km north-east of Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Utopia is a region of great artistic and cultural significance, a place where many esteemed artists have emerged, such as the Petyarre sisters, Polly Ngale, and the great Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

The Alyawarre are one of the two Aboriginal language groups whose traditional lands meet at Utopia, alongside the Anmatyerre, and today Alyawarre is the dominant language of the homelands, spoken by the great majority of residents. Utopia itself was formed in 1978 when the former pastoral lease of the same name was amalgamated with unalienated land to its north, and in 1979–80 the land was returned to its traditional owners as Aboriginal freehold under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act — five clans, four of them Alyawarre, became the legal owners. This return to Country is inseparable from the story of Utopia art: the homelands model saw families living on and caring for their own estates, and the painting movement that produced Emily Kame Kngwarreye and her contemporaries flourished in the decade that followed.

Barbara paints the story of water soakage sites that are dispersed through the arid lands of her ancestral country. A soakage, or soak, is a source of water in Australian deserts, called as such because the water generally seeps into the sand and is stored below ground, sometimes as part of an ephemeral river or creek. Knowledge of water sources is essential for survival in the desert, and there is strong spiritual and cultural connection to the tapestry of creek and river beds that intersect the Utopia homelands. The roundels represent the waterholes from a bird's eye point-of-view, where the vital source bubbles up from the giving land.

The waterways Barbara maps in her paintings belong to a real and remarkable desert geography. Utopia is transected by the Sandover River, and Alyawarre traditional lands take in both the Sandover and Bundey Rivers along with Ooratippra and Fraser Creeks — ephemeral watercourses that may run only after heavy rain, sometimes years apart. For most of the time these rivers exist below the surface, with water held in the sand of their beds, and it is at the soakages along these systems that it can be reached. Knowing precisely where — and which soaks are permanent and which fleeting — is knowledge accumulated over countless generations, and it is this inherited map of Country that sits beneath the clustered roundels of Barbara's canvases.

Barbara uses repetition of circular forms, but uses brushwork rather than a dotting technique. Barbara's use of vibrant, complimentary colours create an effortlessly contemporary aesthetic.