Bush Plum - Angelina Pwerle Ngal

As with her sisters, Kathleen and Poly Ngal, Angelina began producing batiks and wooden sculptures in the mid 1980s, probably influenced by her late husband, the older brother of Cowboy Loy Pwerl. She was formerly known as Angelina ‘Pwerl’, her husband’s name. Pwerl(e) in Alyawarr language is the equivalent to Ngal in the Anmatyerr language, and it is as Angelina Ngal that she is referred to today. She began painting as part of the CAAMA ‘summer project’ in 1988-9 and, already at 40 years of age, was included in the first exhibition of Utopia women’s paintings held in Alice Springs in 1980.

Angelina quickly adapted to painting on canvas and subsequently gained international recognition. Her work can be seen as a contemporary dialogue or translation of the cultural, geographic, social and religious components of Anmatjerre life. Her intimate renditions of country are delicately layered and can be read and appreciated at a superficial level for their abstraction and painterliness. At a deeper level, however, they depict the cultural and social mores of the society in which she lives.

Angelina paints her grandfather’s country, Alparra. Many of her paintings depict the Bush Plum, which she represents through a focus of many coloured dots flooding the canvas. She also paints the multicoloured wild flowers of her country, producing patchworks of colour in an ethereal landscape.