Margaret Boko, Tjulpu - Birds Playing With Plastic Bags, 61x57cm

• Artist - Margaret Boko
• Community - Alice Springs 
• Art Centre/Community organisation - Tangentyere Artists  
• Catalogue number - 7539-16
• Materials - Acrylic on linen
• Size(cm) - H61 W57 D2 
• Postage variants - Artwork posted un-stretched and rolled for safe shipping

This painting is about Tjulpuru [Birds] playing around with plastic bags at Little Sisters Town Camp. Sometimes those plastic bags blow up, and Tjulpuru play fight over him. One time Tjulpuru tried to take Tchitchi [child], but he was too big!
Tjulpu took puppy up there once. Too heavy. Tchitchi [children] all yelling out 'Drop him! Drop him!'. Puppy dropped down. All good. Not hurt.
Sometimes birds swing round and round in circle. His feet are locked together fighting for that plastic bag.
We always watch them playing up in the air.

For a long me Boko lived at the Inkamala Block near Jay Creek with her family, before moving to Alice Springs. Her father's country is M’Bunghara, Glen Helen Station, and her mother was a Pintupi-Warlpiri woman from north-west of Central Mt Wedge. The family settled at Jay Creek Reserve when she was a young girl and after her father left his job as a stock-man on Glen Helen Station. For a short me Boko lived at Papunya so she could go to school. Boko explained in 2007 when she joined Tangentyere Arsts, "I was born in Alice Springs, and went to school at Jay Creek. This is the first time that I am painting. I speak Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara, Luritja and English".

Boko is a grandmother caring for an extended family from her home in Little Sisters Town Camp. She and her husband, David Boko from Docker River, are heavily involved in Tangentyere Council. Boko has been an Executive Board Member of Tangentyere Council for some time. When she first joined Tangentyere Artists, Boko developed an increasingly considered style, using a restrained colour palette, as she painted about her Tjukurrpa narratives involving women, bush tucker, water, and children.

A Telstra NATSIAA finalist twice, for five years, Boko has used figurative/textual elements to tell stories about everyday life 'at home' at Little Sisters Town Camp, out bush with family, and beyond. With detailed and intimate themes, and the eye of a social historian, Boko's paintings are strong and often incorporate both vibrant colour and text to document significant places and events in Boko's life and the life of her extended family and friends. Boko's narrative paintings can be read, a little like a comic book, with vignette after vignette included on a large canvas. The places she paints, and the tales she weaves, are joy-filled and revealing, as she reaches out to her audience to join her in her love of life, family, country, and storytelling.

Representing Aboriginal people from Town Camps, Tangentyere Artists is the only Aboriginal owned, not-for-profit painting studio and gallery in Alice Springs.

Figurative narrative paintings are the Tangentyere Artists’ signature style. By documenting sites and activities familiar to them, Town Camp artists afford their audience insight into their personal histories and everyday lives.

Accordingly, cultural and historical subject matter coexist with scenes of contemporary, urban life. This illuminates the artists’ intimate knowledge and negotiation of both worlds, a duality not well known or represented elsewhere.

The artists detail sites of cultural significance in country, the undertaking of cultural activity, scenes from outstations and recollections of pastoral experiences and mission days. Also represented are the day-to-day affairs of Town Camps; kangaroo tail cooking in the fire, children playing, families talking stories, drinking, playing cards and fixing cars.

Interactions with local police, service providers and townspeople are also intimately documented, with the backdrops revealing urban locations where people congregate, such as the Todd River bed or public lawns. Importantly, these scenes expose a complex temporal order and marginalised realities not well understood by mainstream consciousness.

The choice of subject matter and the way artists choose to illustrate it unwittingly challenges the orthodoxy of Aboriginal art. From behind the veil of more popular representations of Tjukurrpa emerge the actualities of everyday life for Aboriginal people in Central Australia.

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