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Names & Creature Profile

Yawkyawk are female water spirits whose human upper bodies meet fish-like forms. Barkus situates Anniebell Marrngamarrnga’s subjects within Kuninjku tradition around Maningrida. The woman-and-fish shape belongs here to particular Country and family relationships, which give each represented body more than an aquatic outline. [4]

Judith Ryan’s account of Kuninjku art places these beings within particular clan estates, moieties and inherited relationships. An image carries a maker’s authority to present a subject as well as an individual way of making it visible. The striking body is therefore connected to people and Country before it becomes an object seen in a distant gallery. [9]

Homeland & Tradition

Owen Yalandja’s public artist profile identifies him with the Dangkorlo clan and with custodianship of a yawkyawk billabong. Caring for that place is both practical and spiritual responsibility. His carving draws on a relationship he already holds, rather than on a creature selected from an interchangeable stock of motifs. The finished figure carries the choices of a person connected to its subject. [5]

Dorothy Bunibuni’s profile identifies her as Kuninjku and associates her practice with Ji-balbal, her father’s Country. She works with her sister Anniebell Marrngamarrnga, while maintaining an aesthetic of her own. The relationship helps explain collaboration without dissolving two artists into one signature. Local pandanus and bush dyes make Country part of the work’s material substance as well as its subject. Her public career also reaches the National Museum of Australia and the 2023 Shadow Spirit exhibition at Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station. A work can travel far from its materials’ origin while retaining the artist’s connection to that place. [7]

Historical Record

Keller follows Lena Yarinkura, a Kune artist working with Rembarrnga artist Bob Burruwal, from the award-winning Family Drama of 1994 into twined three-dimensional spirits. Her 1997 Family of Yawkyawk used rounded bodies and flattened tail structures. That history precedes the later Kuninjku flat-framed forms, giving weaving more than one route into a spirit’s body. [2]

Gary Lee gives Owen Yalandja’s carving a different chronology. His father Crusoe Kuningbal taught him to carve mimih figures. After Kuningbal’s death in 1984, Owen and his brother continued making large figures. In the 1990s Owen developed his yawkyawk forms, changing the surface treatment and using the wood’s curves. An inherited practice became the starting point for a recognizable personal direction. Lee describes the shift from a red ground to black and the progression into arcs and V-shaped scale marks. The altered surface helps distinguish these water-beings from the earlier figures through which the carver learned his craft. [3]

Appearance & Signs

Lulu Laradjbi’s 2005 National Museum sculpture has an orange face, dangling fibre hair and extended arms. Its broad, leaf-shaped body opens into dark mesh, narrowing toward a fanlike tail. Light enters the spaces between fibres, making the woven body permeable. [1]

Anniebell’s 2007 work in the NGV has a denser body, filled with strongly contrasting orange, purple and dark patterns. Two smaller faces and fish-bodied figures occupy the larger body. The museum identifies them as a mother’s two babies. The smaller beings make generation visible inside the single hanging form. This particular sculpture gives the water spirit a family relationship as well as a tail. [10]

Nature & Powers

The museum’s public account gives the spirits singing beneath water, sunning beside pools and walking at night. Turtles, dragonflies and beetles appear among their possible forms. Weather and waterway care extend their attributed powers beyond the fish-like body. [1]

The shape of a carved figure can make movement present without showing a complete journey. Lee describes Owen’s use of a naturally forked tree to create the tail, with the curved trunk guiding the whole form. The material contributes a direction and a posture. A stationary sculpture can suggest a body turning or slipping away through the line the wood already offers. [3]

Tales & Encounters

In the National Museum’s account, the sisters travel between clan estates, carrying a digging stick and sacred string while seeking food. They camp beside a deep waterhole. Their cooking fire angers Ngalyod, who emerges and swallows them. They become ancestor spirits connected with that place and its waterway protector. [1]

Ryan presents a separately named version involving Likanaya and Marrayka. Their travels through Kuninjku Country bring them to a camp too close to Ngalyod’s waterhole; the girls’ legs and feet become fish tails. The names and transformation belong to that attributed presentation. The two public accounts share the importance of the dangerous camping place while expressing the change through different details. [9]

Marina Murdilnga, a Kuninjku artist and Mick Kubarrkku’s daughter, developed her flat-framed form in 2003. Keller describes pandanus knotted around a vine frame to create tail, body and long neck. Her second example used dyed fibre; feathers could suggest algae-like hair. Other women subsequently developed their own versions of this framed technique. [2]

Anniebell learned fibre work from her mother Nancy Djulumba. Her husband Dick Nadjolorro made frames that she filled with weaving. The 2021 exhibition account describes pandanus collected and coloured with ash and roots before she worked it into a body. Their different tasks belong to the finished form: the support establishes its span, and the repeated work of fibre gives it surface, density and colour. The yellow and dark brown dyes emerge through boiling the fibre with the gathered ingredients. Colour is prepared through another practical transformation before it becomes part of the figure’s finished pattern. [6]

Landscape & Associations

Barkus explains a public relationship between body and Country: a river bend can be represented through a tail, and a billabong through a head. That connection makes the human-fish outline more than a generalized aquatic costume. Features of a local water system become features of a figure. The body can hold a remembered place without resembling a conventional map displayed beside it. [4]

For Dorothy, gathering local pandanus and preparing bush dyes are integral to weaving. Her profile connects seasonal materials, inherited knowledge and the practice she shares with Anniebell. Country consequently enters the work through repeated actions: finding, collecting, preparing and making. The place is present in what a finished sculpture is made from, even for a viewer who first encounters it indoors. [7]

Variants & Kindred Beings

Rounded twined figures and flat framed figures solve different problems of volume. Keller keeps Yarinkura’s Kune practice and Murdilnga’s Kuninjku practice distinct. Shared subject matter leaves room for individual technique and cultural affiliation, as fibre becomes a body occupying space beyond the useful objects from which some methods developed. [2]

The two infants in the NGV sculpture make this exact work more than a specimen of an agreed appearance. Its broad body contains smaller ones, while the fish-shaped endings repeat the larger form. A viewer’s attention moves between overall silhouette and the family within it. The artist’s construction offers that relationship directly, through scale and placement, rather than through a separate illustrated episode. At over two and a half metres high, the work gives that family a substantial presence. The museum records natural dyes on pandanus and bamboo, and Mark Chapman’s gift in 2008. Its size and materials remain part of this particular object’s identity. [10]

Meaning & Belief

Barkus situates pandanus work among women who share time, conversation and care for children. Material preparation also follows a season: new growth collected after the monsoon supplies fibre, and local roots, leaves, berries or bark supply colours. A large woven body concentrates many such acts. Its scale makes labour visible, while its surface preserves the handling of strands whose colours began in other plants. [4]

Owen’s public statement emphasizes that his current style is his own. The profile describes the arcs and scale-like marks he developed, rather than presenting the figures as anonymous expressions of a timeless type. Custodianship and invention are both part of the account. A maker can carry inherited responsibility while making a form immediately distinguishable from another artist’s work. He also chooses curving kurrajong trunks that can give the body its slender direction. A distinctive figure begins in selecting the wood, before painted marks make that choice more legible on its surface. [5]

Later Retellings & Reception

The 2023 Shadow Spirit exhibition statement places Anniebell’s and Dorothy’s large woven forms above a scene that also includes freshwater crocodile and stingray. Ken Ngindjalakku Djungkidj’s three-dimensional figures bring mimih among rocks and yawkyawk onto land, while Paul Nabulumo Namarinjmak’s painting gives Kubumi another visible form. Several artists and media contribute to the same installation. The water spirits enter a company of beings and a named landscape, rather than appearing as isolated creatures suspended in empty space. [8]

Anniebell’s 2021 public exhibition account also describes a visit to JamFactory and collaboration with textile and furniture designer Ivana Taylor. The resulting Bindalbindal extended her practice through another working relationship. Alongside the account of frames made by Dick Nadjolorro, this episode gives her career a history of collaboration across different settings. The maker remains central as the work travels and new possibilities develop. [6]

Evidence & Open Questions

Ryan’s discussion connects individual vision with mentorship and the right to represent particular subjects. Reading the art through those relationships preserves more than the figure’s outline. It lets a named object carry a named maker’s decisions, and it allows related images to differ. The apparently familiar woman-and-fish shape gains its particular meaning through the place, family and artistic history attached to it. [9]

The Shadow Spirit arrangement offers a useful consequence of that attention. Woven bodies, carved figures and a painting can share a landscape without becoming one artist’s work or one fixed portrait. A viewer can follow the relationships between them while still recognizing each contribution. The installation gives water, land and several kinds of being a shared presence through deliberate acts of making. Its hanging bodies and figures placed among rocks establish different levels of space. The viewer encounters a composition of relationships: beings above and below, forms that belong in water and forms that can move onto land. [8]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

The National Museum’s public story anchors the camping transformation. Keller follows the distinct fibre histories; Lee and Barkus give the carvers and weavers named artistic biographies. Ryan develops the relationship between Country and artistic authority. The art centre’s artist and exhibition texts keep later collaborations visible, while the exact NGV and National Museum objects allow attention to particular bodies. [1][2][3][4][9][5][6][7][8][10]

Yawkyawk sculptures ↗
National Museum of Australia curatorial staff · National Museum of Australia
Complete public collection essay: Ancestral beings, transformation account, Sculpting spirits, Materials and techniques, Evolution of yawkyawk; enlarged Lulu Laradjbi 2005 image
Entire actual public essay and visible object captions read in browser, including full sister/campfire/Ngalyod sequence and attributed powers. Actual enlarged complete Lulu Laradjbi 2005 sculpture pixels inspected. Marina Murdilnga’s other 2005 works and Dorothy/Anniebell 2022 image pixels not successfully inspected; captions alone do not become visual observations. First woven example in 2003 is read in the context of the flat-framed Kuninjku form, not a denial of Yarinkura’s earlier woven figures.

The artist’s reading of the legend

Illuminated folios

These artworks interpret the stories and landscapes explored here. They are imaginative illustrations, rather than historical records or evidence of an encounter.

An adult female freshwater spirit with flowing algae-like hair and two full human arms rests one hand on a rock; her other hand and tapering fish tail are visible beneath the moonlit pool, framed in dark silver and blue-green glass. — Original interpretive illustration informed by the National Museum of Australia’s public freshwater description of Yawkyawk; the figure, landscape and ornamental frame are artistic choices.

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