Kurtal: Dancing with Clouds - David Jarinyanu Downs

This painting by Jarinyanu David Downs depicts Kurtal: Dancing with Clouds, the ancestral rain man central to the artist’s practice. In Walmajarri Ngarrangkarni (Dreaming), Kurtal travels across Country as a storm being, generating rain and creating permanent water sources as he moves inland.

As described in the 1988 exhibition catalogue by Duncan Kentish, Kurtal’s journey culminates in a final ceremonial dance, after which he transforms into a snake and enters the earth, remaining within a permanent rockhole spring. From this place, he continues to hold power, bringing rain and inhabiting the dramatic storms that mark the onset of the wet season.

Rendered in natural ochres, the composition evokes this transformation and movement between sky and earth. Cloud forms, lightning, and serpentine elements suggest Kurtal’s shifting presence, while references to ceremony and gathered figures reinforce the connection between ancestral action and ongoing cultural practice.

Born in the Great Sandy Desert in the 1920s, Downs developed a highly individual practice in the Kimberley from the early 1980s, working across painting and sculptural forms. His work centres on the Kurtal cycle, through which he articulated a deeply held system of knowledge linking ceremony, weather, and Country.