Sun/Shadow: The Appearance of Pitjantjatjara ‘Hand Talk’:
Tjuntjuntjara Community Artists, Louise Allerton

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'Nyawa!', Donna, Munjee, Tarlisha Currie, Naomi Felton & Louise Allerton, 2025

Exhibition

Aṉangu from Tjuntjuntjara Community (WA), have a rich cultural practice of gestural co-speech, a language using the hands, face and body. These gestures can be used to communicate across distance or in situations where speech is considered impolite or inappropriate. It is integral and embedded in everyday communications while being subtle and hidden, often going unnoticed by outsiders.

This body of collaborative photomedia experiments offers a glimpse into the vibrant and dynamic cultural practice of Marangka wangkapai (hand talk), drawing on years of creative and collaborative research between Allerton and Tjuntjuntjara artists, after decades of living and working together on Spinifex Country.

The work explores how the culturally significant visual duality of Sun and Shadow for Aṉangu in Tjuntjuntjara, can be seen through contemporary aesthetics of the everyday. Through this, the work highlights how Pitjantjatjara ‘hand talk’ is an evolving, vibrant and unique language that expresses Aṉangu connections to culture and place. The work is presented as an immersive and accessible environment, indicative of domestic, natural and social settings, such as home, hunting trips and community discos.

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Exhibition artists

Tjuntjuntjara Community Artists

Sun/Shadow features work by 14 anangu artists, who live and work in Tjuntjuntjara Community, on Spinifex Country. They are Maureen Donegan, Pamela Hogan, Regina Lyons, Michelle Anderson, Bernard Nixon, Jarrod Currie, Stuart Baker, Ethan Hansen, Campbell “Matthew” Watson, Diane Thompson, Naomi Felton, Ngalpingka Simms, Sophia Brown and Tarlisha Currie. Their work for this show has been supported by Jasper Twigg.

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Louise Allerton

Louise Allerton is an Australian artist and arts worker. A Master of Fine Arts graduate of the National Art School, and currently undertaking a PhD at University of Canberra, she has been an active Arts practitioner since 2002. A been a finalist in a number of awards including the National Photographic Portrait Prize (2013), Head On (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010), the Citigroup Photographic Awards (2004), the Iris Award (2004), the Ulrick Schubert Award (2004, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012), the Olive Cotton Award (2005, 2006, 2015), and the Great Southern Art Award (2010). She spent 20 years living in indigenous remote communities which has profoundly shaped her relationship to landscape, community and culture. Much of her photographic work explores the human dimensions to landscapes and environments and the visceral energy of place. It displays a deep engagement with Western Australian landscape.

As an arts worker, she has over 20 years experience working in remote indigenous communities, facilitating arts practice and managing relationships between indigenous arts practitioners and non-indigenous organisations. In this time she has developed deep experience in, and knowledge of, indigenous arts practice, cultural protocols and the successful development of arts in remote community contexts. She has deep knowledge of cultural protocols, approaches to respectful and successful collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous organisations, and the development of arts practice. Louise also has strong experience of regional arts practice, the support systems available to sustain its development and approaches to community engagement in regional contexts.

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A black and white photograph of a woman smiling wearing large dark sunglasses

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