Angilyiya Mitchell

Angilyiya was born near to Blackstone Ranges in Emu Country near Kunmarnarra Bore. There is important men’s Dreaming in this country which is a traditional law area. She is a strong Law woman with wonderful bush skills, holding a wealth of traditional knowledge and capacity to live on this land. Angilyiya is the senior caretaker for important woman’s dreaming places, linked to the Seven Sisters story.

She created her first painting in 1994 and has been consistently active as an artist since and has also made limited edition prints, wood carving to make punu (small wood sculptures) and wira (bowls), and making bush medicines. She is very active in teaching and mentoring in language, culture and heritage. She is frequently called upon by the local Land Management team to come on trips and ‘talk for rockholes’ because of her knowledge of country/sites and ability to teach about ethnobotany and share Tjukurrpa (ancestral creation) stories. She says she is the ‘only one left to teach young people’.

Angilyiya has also been a keen member of NPY Women’s Council and of Tjanpi Desert Weavers (TDW) making sculptural objects such as baskets and animal figures out of natural fibre, tjanpi (local grasses), raffia and wool. Angiliyiya has been commissioned to contribute to major projects including creating a grass Toyota that won first prize in the 2005 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art (NATSIA) Award Angilyiya was also a part of the Seven Sisters Songline creating a tjanpi female sculptural figure – one of the Seven Sisters of the Tjukurrpa – for the extraordinary multi-faceted National Museum of Australia (NMA) Songlines exhibition that was on display at the NMA in Canberra from 2017 to 2018.