SELINA NUMINA KAPRINA  – Kaytetye Artist from Utopia region

Selina went to primary school at Stirling Station in the north Utopia region near Tennant Creek. Her mother’s homelands. Selina as with her sisters and brothers were sent to boarding school in Darwin as no secondary schooling was available in Tennant Creek of Alice Springs.
Selina currently resides in Darwin but regularly visits her Country.

Selina and her sisters, and mother, come from a long line of desert painters of the contemporary Aboriginal art and dot-dot central desert movement from well renowned painter aunties: Gloria and Kathleen Petyerre, who are well established artists in Alice Springs.

The Bush Medicine Leaves Dreaming knowledge story is a popular theme of the Numina Sisters. Many women from the Peytre, Mambitji and Numina family name hold custody of the story and knowledge keepers of painting series-themes such as Bush Medicine Leaves, Bush Tucker, Seeded, Soakage, Women’ s Ceremony etc – in common with other skin groups across the vast arid creek beds and red sand of central Australia.

Subjects of importance in the theme-series painted are various bush tucker. Plant foods include wild berries, plums, onion, yam, seeds etc. Many animals can be depicted as food source or as totems such as Thorny Devil Lizard and Dingo Tracks.
Women’s Ceremony, Awelye Body Art Ceremony are mostly painted by senior ladies but younger women need to know it from a young age. Some themes such as Bush Tucker can be open and universal others can be secret and or significant cultural ceremonies.

Knowing, carrying and reinforcing these stories gives respect for Country and ancestors and shows responsibility and care of holding such stories to keep the stories and traditional practices alive. The knowledge must be retold repeatedly and handed on.

The Numina Sisters have all been taught to paint by their earlier elder painter grandmothers, mother-auntys, and cousin-sisters connected across the Central Desert region. Their mother’s and grandmother’s Country is in the bush and remote Stirling Station. Their father is from Utopia community side.

John Clague studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art (BFA with honors, 1956) under Edris Eckhardt, Walter Sinz, Walter Midner, John Bergschneider, Julius Schmidt, and William McVey. As a fourth-year student he was awarded a Yale/Norfolk Fellowship and upon graduation, spent an eye-opening year in Europe as a Catherwood Foundation Traveling Fellow. His career was spent teaching sculpture at Oberlin College and the Cleveland Institute of Art. Before retiring in 1971, Clague became the chairman of the Department of Sculpture for the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Clague’s sculptures have been exhibited in the Whitney Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture and in twenty eight May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He is represented in the permanent collections of the CMA (six sculptures including his 1960 bronze Flower of Erebus and his 1963 Plexiglas Progression in Black and White), the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the University of Massachusetts, and the Williams College Museum of Art. His work is documented in the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and represented in The Sculpture of the End of the 19th and the 20th Centuries (Éditions Rencontre, Paris, 1966/67). John Clague is best known for his monumental sculptures – bold, airy, and abstract forms in bronze, steel, and fiberglass. He used light to play with the surfaces of his sculptures, using black and white, multiple colors, and occasionally polished them to a shine.