Cynthia Burke

2018, burnt etching on plywood
30 x 40 cm
Cat No WB652-18

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Punu – Living Wood
Maruku Arts

Cynthia Burke was born in Alice Springs and grew up in the central desert of Western Australia. She has been a youth and media worker for many years and hosts a weekly radio programme for Radio NGm. Cynthia is an internationally exhibited painter with Warakurna Artists and also works with Tjanpi Desert Weavers. She is one of Maruku’s foremost up and coming wood carvers, and its youngest directors. She carries on the traditions of the Tjukurpa, the Law and way of life governing her country.

Walka is Desert design and inextricably linked with Tjukurpa: the Law and way of life of Anangu (Central and Western Desert Aboriginal people). The symbols were traditionally used in cave, ground and body paintings, in story telling, teaching and signalling inheritance.

Cynthia has created a kapi tjukurla or water hole design. By their very nature, waterholes also mark sites related to the Creation Ancestors’ journeys across the country; the ‘dreaming tracks’ followed by countless generations of Anangu since. They created landforms and customs to be passed on and maintained over subsequent generations. The sites are linked through inma or ceremony - the singing, dancing and body painting which reveals the laws of nature and provides a blue print for life and a guiding map of country.

– MARUKU ARTS