Product Description

The son of Rosie Kunoth Kngwarreye, Dinny was born in 1954 at Utopia Homestead. As a young man, he worked on the stations, branding and mustering cattle at Amaroo, Waite River and Utopia Stations. Dinny had witnessed the emergence of the art movement and assisted his wife in the laborious process of harvesting wood for her sculptures. Together, the pair would ‘head out bush’ with their axes to find the soft-wooded bean trees (Erythrina vespertilio). Sometimes these trips would require 100 kilometre long drives to find appropriate trees. After felling the tree, they would bring the trunk back to their camp, where they would carve it using tomahawks, files, sandpaper and a large rasp.

From the outset, the subject of birds has been heavily featured in the oeuvre of both Josie and Dinny. A wild aviary has sprung from their collective artistic imagination. Whether eagle, owl, emu or hawk, each is created unique, coloured with its own eccentric disposition. But beyond revelling in natural variety, their dedication to avian form reveals an intuitively modernist project of repetition and refinement in which the artists explore the reductive potential of both the sculptural medium and this favoured motif.