ERNABELLA ARTS VISIT

Each year at Skein we are fortunate enough to be offered new opportunities that expand our portfolio and that introduce us to new people and places.

In November 2018, we travelled to northern South Australia to visit Ernabella Arts on Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY lands) at the eastern end of the Musgrave Ranges - a place that we’d been wanting to visit for a long time.

We travelled up to Alice Springs from Adelaide where we spent two days exploring the town and familiarising ourselves with the desert landscape.

In Alice Springs, we met up with Mel Henderson from Ku Arts, which is the South Australian support organisation for Aboriginal art centres and artists. Mel was our guide and driver down to the APY. Before leaving Alice, Mel took us to a few local sites - Araluen Art Centre and ANZAC Hill lookout - and back to the airport to meet Derek Thompson, an Ernabella Arts ceramic artist, who joined us for his trip back home.

We scored beautiful weather for the drive down and were blown away by the frequently-morphing, vast, and colourful landscapes. It’s a four to five hour drive and time flies by with such amazing scenery to take in.

We arrived late afternoon in Pukatja and met up with Mel George, Ernabella Arts manager and had a brief tour of the art centre and introduction to the community. Ernabella Arts is an Aboriginal owned and run corporation which promotes and supports ethical practice in the creation and sale of Indigenous art.

Our four days in Ernabella consisted of meeting artists and the wider community and documenting the daily art centre and studio activity to get an understanding of how the spaces function. We also spent some time in the ceramics studio with artist in residence Ashlee Hopkins.

The rest of our time in Pukatja was spent wandering around the community and taking short drives to the outskirts of town, flash trips out to scenic lookouts, and meeting the mail plane at the air strip.

Skein are planning to be back in Pukatja sometime in the first half of 2019 for an exciting new project and look forward to strengthening our relationship with Ernabella Arts and Ku Arts. Thanks to the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara people for welcoming us and allowing us to visit and to Mel from Ernabella Arts and Marie and Mel form Ku Arts for making the trip possible.