Utopia Bequest

The Utopia Collection Bequest features some of the gallery’s Indigenous collection. This particular collection includes textile practice from Aboriginal artists living in Utopia.

Named by German settlers in the early 1920s, Utopia is a region covering approximately 5000 square kilometres of land northeast of Alice Springs and is home to around 2000 Aboriginal people. Much of the region loosely termed ‘Utopia’ is Aboriginal-owned land called Urapuntja. Utopia comprises several large and small communities.

As was the case in many other public galleries in Australia, Aboriginal art had no part in the earliest history of the Tamworth Regional Gallery Collection. The Utopia Collection Bequest, received in 1999, is therefore not only a unique collection of historically and culturally important works from Utopia, but also a significant development for the gallery.

The Utopia Collection Bequest consists of 13 batik silks, four acrylic paintings on paper, five silk screen prints, six etchings and aquatints, and six carved wooden ceremonial figures.

Aboriginal artists were already long-time masters of the tjanting (tulis) batik technique. Their characteristic style of working is to combine tjanting work with hand-painted motifs focusing around bush tucker themes and the flora and fauna of the outback.