Modern art
Today Anangu still create sand drawings and body paintings for religious and ceremonial expression, and teaching and storytelling, but do not use rock paintings any more.
Now they also have available a wide range of new materials to use including acrylic paints and canvases and have acquired new skills such as painting on ceramics and punu, wood carving and decorating.
Although the mediums may have changed Anangu artists use the same symbols and meanings that have been used over many generations. This enables Anangu to continue passing on the Tjukurpa through storytelling as well as providing the community with a source of income.
Anangu first began transferring sand paintings onto canvas during the 1970's. The popularity and demand for western desert paintings has been increasing ever since with the paintings being sold locally, nationally and internationally. Contemporary media and Aboriginal art enterprises now enable broad distribution of paintings and crafts depicting traditional designs.
Paintings and crafts in this style are on display in the visitor exhibitions and for sale at the commercial enterprises in the Uluru - Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre.
Design of the Park Entry Ticket - Tjukurpa of Uluru
Anangu ask that you respect the Tjukurpa by keeping your park entry ticket, not discarding it or giving it away.
The painting, by Malya Teamay, that is on the ticket depicts the important stories of Uluru. Uluru is represented in the centre of the painting by concentric circles. The different shades of colour surrounding Uluru show the different land and vegetation (which is all Tjukurpa), crossed by these ancestral beings on their journeys to Uluru.
The ancestral beings (Tjukuritja) represented in this painting are:
- Kuniya, the Python Woman with her eggs (top-right of painting);
- Liru, the venomous snake (top-left of painting);
- Kurpany, the doglike creature represented by the paw prints (bottom-left); and
- Mala the rufous hare wallaby represented by the wallaby tracks (bottom right).
The footprints and spears represent the warriors of the Warmala revenge party who travelled from West of Uluru looking for Kuniya.
This painting also appears on the cover of the Uluru -Kata Tjuta National Park Plan of Management (2000).
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