Pike Family

Exhibition: 4 April – 21 May 2014

Jimmy Pike (1940–2002) was a great story teller and illustrator of the traditional lifestyle that he experienced as a young man living with his family in the Great Sandy Desert. During the 1990s Jimmy Pike became a very well known artist, a prolific drawer using multi-coloured felt pens, painter, printmaker, designer for textiles and silk goods. His stories of the desert became everyday items in the wider Australian cities.

This exhibition is the first occasion where the works of three Pike family members – Jimmy Pike, Edgar Pike and Edgar’s daughter Francine Steele – have been shown together.

Read more about the Pike Family

The Pike Family

As a teenager, Jimmy Pike followed most of his countrymen who had begun moving north into the cattle station country of the Fitzroy Valley. They had heard of abundant food and water to be found there, and the desert was steadily being depopulated as the northward migration of families continued.

Japingka Gallery has a 30 year long association with the family of Jimmy Pike, and the gallery was named after a site deep in the Great Sandy Desert that was the main meeting place for Walmajarri people, including Jimmy Pike’s clan, when they all came together. During the dry season the people followed the movements of animal or the flowering of bush plants to find places of greatest food supply. They moved between waterholes in small family groups so as not to over burden the resources. But during the northern cyclone season, the storms would roll into the desert and replenish the waterholes and revive the land.

That was the one time, usually around Christmas time, when there was enough food and water for the people to all be in one place. They came together and managed all social and marital business and carried out ceremonies and rituals. Relatives would meet each other after a year of absence – it was a time of great significance.

In the desert waterholes need to be maintained and land needs to be managed by patchwork burning. As the population dwindled from people leaving the desert, the land itself became less productive, the waterholes were covered over with drifting sand and the larger animals disappeared. The time honoured balance between man and the land was interrupted.

Thirty years after his family left the desert Jimmy Pike began recording his memories in paintings and in books written with his wife Pat Lowe. He painted for about 22 years and his artworks were represented in major collections, both nationally and internationally.

At the time of Jimmy Pike’s passing his brother Edgar Pike had began painting some works at his small community at Ngumpan. Edgar was about 5 or 6 years younger than Jimmy, and said that he remembered fewer stories of his family life in the desert. But the great oral tradition of the desert life was compelling, and the people had begun making journeys back into the old country, revisiting the sacred sites and major waterholes. Edgar Pike’s paintings recorded some of the major sites that his brother had been painting previously.

Edgar Pike’s daughter Francine Steele developed into a skilled artist in her own right and although early in her career, her paintings are distinctive and impressive. Jimmy Pike began his career in Fremantle before Japingka Gallery was formed, when his first drawings and limited edition prints were created there in the early 1980s. The works of Edgar and Francine are now brought together with some of the wider output of Jimmy Pike, including prints and silk scarves.

Read more:

• Jimmy Pike Paintings

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Jimmy Pike – Art of the Great Sandy Desert