Regina Pilawuk Wilson facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Regina Pilawuk Wilson
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Regina Pilawuk Wilson with her granddaughter Leaya Wilson at the opening of "Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia" at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
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| Born | 1948 Wudikapildyerr
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| Spouse(s) | Harold Wilson |
| Children | Annunciata Nunuk Wilson (daughter), Harold Wilson Jr. (son), Anastasia Naiya Wilson (daughter), John Wilson (son), Henry Wilson (son), Anne-Carmel Nimbali Wilson (daughter) |
Regina Pilawuk Wilson is a famous Aboriginal Australian artist. She is known for her beautiful paintings, prints, and woven artworks. Her art often shows important cultural items like syaws (fish nets), warrgarri (dilly bags), and message sticks.
Regina's artwork has been displayed in many museums and galleries in Australia and around the world. In 2003, she won a major award, the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award, for one of her fish net paintings. She has also been a finalist for other important art prizes.
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About Regina Pilawuk Wilson
Regina Pilawuk Wilson was born in 1948 in a place called Wudikapildyerr, near the Daly River in Australia's Northern Territory. She is a very skilled weaver and started painting with acrylics in 2001. Her paintings often show designs inspired by her weaving.
When she was just ten years old, her grandmother taught her how to find and prepare plants for weaving. She learned where and when to collect grasses, vines, and natural colors from flowers, berries, and roots. Over many years, she became an expert in different weaving styles. She is now a respected leader in her community because of her strong connection to her family and culture.
Regina has also explored durrmu, which is a traditional body painting style using dots. She has made silk screen prints and etchings with special art studios. In 2007, she played a big part in starting the Durrmu Arts center in her community, Peppimenarti. She lives there with her family, including her children, sisters, and many grandchildren. Her sisters, Mabel Jimarin and Margaret Kundu, are also artists.
Peppimenarti Community
Regina Pilawuk Wilson and her husband, Harold Wilson, started the Peppimenarti Community in 1971. Harold Wilson was born in 1938 and passed away in 1998. Peppimenarti means "large rock." This community is a permanent home for the Ngangikurrungurr people.
It is located among floodplains and wetlands in the Daly River Aboriginal Reserve, about 250 kilometers southwest of Darwin. This area is very important to the Ngangikurrungurr language group because of its "dreaming sites." During the wet season, it's hard to get to the community, which has helped keep their traditions and culture strong.
About 150 to 200 people live in Peppimenarti. Many of them travel to other places during the dry season and return when the rains begin.
Art and Culture at Durrmu Arts
At Durrmu Arts, many prints are made from designs found on dilly bags and woven baskets. The artists there teach children their language, culture, and how to weave. Regina believes it is very important to teach these skills so that weaving traditions remain strong.
In 2011, the Peppimenarti Association created the Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation. This group represents many famous weavers and painters who use durrmu designs in their art. Peppimenarti is a peaceful town where formal education is highly valued.
Regina and other women at Durrmu Arts have brought new life to the tradition of making large, round mats by using bright colors. Later, Regina started painting to put these weaving designs onto bigger, flat surfaces. Durrmu Arts is run by a small group of women. Artists often gather in the outdoor studio in the morning to paint and weave before it gets too hot.
Regina's Artistic Journey
Regina's syaws (fish nets), mats, and warrgadi (dilly bags) are central to her art. Her unique style involves taking these handmade, useful objects and showing their designs on canvas, prints, and fabrics. This special connection is featured in major art shows like "Floating Life" and "String Theory."
At Durrmu Arts, Regina helps new artists, but her painting style is unique. Her work sometimes looks like the cross-hatching used by Aboriginal bark painters. This connection reminds us how Aboriginal communities are linked. Regina says her people used to send messages over long distances using message sticks. These message sticks and the fine dots and lines from durrmu (body paint) have also inspired her recent paintings.
Her art shows an abstract style. It was part of an exhibition called "Talking About Abstraction" in Sydney in 2004. This show celebrated Aboriginal painters who had inspired a new generation of city artists. Regina says that small changes are key to her work. She explains: "That style, I like it to always be with the old design. I like to keep the traditional story in there, but I change it a little, to keep it beautiful with different colour and pattern. Otherwise, it’s always the same design, and we all get tired of it. It needs to be interesting, so I am interested, and the people who look at it are interested and they want to learn about my culture."
Developing Her Painting Style
Regina tried acrylic painting at an art festival in 2000. In 2001, she experimented with many designs and techniques in art workshops. This is when she began to transfer her weaving designs and patterns from fish nets, dilly bags, wall mats, sun mats, and baskets onto canvas.
She also includes message sticks in her paintings to show their rich textures. Message sticks are a traditional way for communities to communicate.
At a discussion, Regina explained what inspires her weaving. Her people, the Ngangikurrungurr, passed down fishnet stitches from one generation to the next, with each community having its own special stitch. However, when Europeans settled in the Daly River region, Aboriginal people were forced onto reserves. Many traditional fishnet stitches were lost.
Regina and her husband left the mission to start Peppimenarti to protect their way of life. She was determined to bring back the old fishnet stitches. She found an old woman who remembered the stitch her grandfather had created. After learning it, Regina painted the stitch onto canvas so it would never be forgotten again. Her paintings are a way to share her culture. Her work is modern art that makes people think differently. A main message in her art is to remember the past to understand the present and hope for the future.
The Art of Syaw
Syaw paintings copy the detailed and delicate patterns of woven objects like mats, baskets, and fish traps. The changing colors and repeated patterns show how a weaver's hands move. Regina paints many different stitching and weaving designs, drawing from her grandmother's work.
The weaving method used in Syaw is similar to the stitch used for warrgarri (dilly bags), but bigger. The pinbin vine, or bush vine, that grows near the river is stripped into fibers. These fibers are then woven into a net. The Syaw is used to catch fish, prawns, and other edible creatures in rivers.
Regina's dense, overlapping lines might look abstract, but they are always based on a real object. The woven shapes seem to take on a huge, cosmic size, with thousands of wavy lines spreading out from a center or across a surface. Recently, her work has been shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C..
Important Exhibitions
Regina Pilawuk Wilson's art has been shown in many significant exhibitions:
- 2006: Dreaming Their Way: Australian Aboriginal Women Painters. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC and The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.
- 2016: Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA.
- 2016-2019: Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia. This exhibition traveled to several places: Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami, FL; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
- Her work has also been part of group exhibitions at many public and private art places, including the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2008).
Art Collections
Regina Pilawuk Wilson's artwork is held in many important collections around the world:
