Designed and made by Carol Panangka Rontji (b. 1972), Aranda language group. Carol Rontji has been working at the Hermannsburg Pottery since its establishment in 1991, and has exhibited regularly with the group. Like the other potters in the group, she models animals and birds to decorate the covers of the jars she makes, specialising in snakes, lizards, cockatoos, witchitty(sic) grubs, owl and emu. Her recent pots have featured landscapes painted in a version of the style associated with the artist Albert Namatjira, and which is now characteristic of this group of artists from this area. This is a recent development of the decoration of the pots produced by the group, whose work originally showed more abstract graphic depictions of land and narrative. Carol Rontji has also been a key artist in the production of a number of large tile murals, combining bush life with landscape in similar designs.

The potters are working with a handbuilding process, using terracotta clay, and have recently been influenced by Pueblo ceramics at the University of Santa Fe, where similar processes are carried out. The use of clay instead of watercolour paper and wooden tools is a development that has occurred since 1991.

Designed and made by Carol Panangka Rontji (b. 1972), Aranda language group. Carol Rontji has been working at the Hermannsburg Pottery since its establishment in 1991, and has exhibited regularly with the group. Like the other potters in the group, she models animals and birds to decorate the covers of the jars she makes, specialising in snakes, lizards, cockatoos, witchitty(sic) grubs, owl and emu. Her recent pots have featured landscapes painted in a version of the style associated with the artist Albert Namatjira, and which is now characteristic of this group of artists from this area. This is a recent development of the decoration of the pots produced by the group, whose work originally showed more abstract graphic depictions of land and narrative. Carol Rontji has also been a key artist in the production of a number of large tile murals, combining bush life with landscape in similar designs.

Made by Carol Rontji at Hermannsburg Pottery. The Lutheran Mission at Hermannsburg set up one of the earliest cottage industries for Aboriginal people. From the 1930s the Aranda people people made, for example, carved and pokerworked wooden artefacts, leather goods, needlework and kangaroo-skin rugs for a tourist market. Later they became well-known for their distinctive European style of watercolour painting. Albert Namatjira was the leading painter of the Aranda water-colour school. The children at Hermannsburg have been brought up aware of this tradition, and were taught to paint in this way. When the pottery was set up in the early 1990s, the women started at first to paint abstract, graphic designs about their environment on them. They also started to make the characteristic covers for their jars, featuring modelled animals and birds. In recent years, some of the artists, like Carol Rontji, have started to decorate their pots in the 'watercolour landscape' tradition.

Selected by Grace Cochrane while visiting Hermannsburg in November 1995, and sent to the Museum after firing.

Jar, 'Purti Endoola' (Magpies), base and lid, terracotta, underglaze colours, landscape design with modelled magpies on cover, Carol Rontji, Hermannsburg Potters, Hermannsburg, Northern Territory, Australia, 1995

Jar, flat base, rising to ovoid shape with small opening. Flat cover, with internal rim, and two modelled magpies perched in opposite directions on top. Painted illustration of desert landscape around Hermannsburg, horizon line just above halfway, ochre colour below, brown hills and pale blue sky above. Small dark green bushes across land, with black branches, brown shadows. In the close foreground, on one side, brown branches with green leaves and white and ochre blossom, and two honey-eaters (with longer beaks than the magpies on the cover) in black with white and ochre feather decoration. The cover is pale blue, like the upper half of the jar, with a brown central branch, on which, facing in different directions, are two black magpies with pink eyes, white beaks and white feather decoration. Marked CR 356 underneath.
(-1) Jar base
(-2) Jar lid

Designed: Rontji, Carol; Australia

Made: Rontji, Carol; Australia; 1995

On base, handwritten in black ink: "CR 356".

96/46/2

175 mm

110 mm