c.1943 – 2012.
Born Artetyerre (Harts Range), worked in Mparntwe (Alice Springs).
Billy Benn Perrurle was a painter working in Central Australia, who’s worked focused primarily on his home country of Artyerre. The Mwerre Anthurre Artist collective was founded around his talent in 2000. By painting his land, Billy brought the country into himself. Only when he had painted every hill from his country, would he stop and return home. Bill’s paintings cover a wide scope of style, born of his own lack of preciousness, his vivid imagination and colour, texture and material experimentation strategies, rather than the study of other painterly influences.
His two older sisters, Ally and Gladdy Kemerre, taught Billy how to paint on skin when he was a teenager, while living at Kurrajong/Urapuntja (Utopia). Their father, Jimmy Kemerre, was also an artist, making more traditional artifacts, wooden sculptures, boomerangs and spears.
He began working as a young boy, aged approximately 10, in the mica mines of Harts Range, and also mined for gold out at Altunga, transporting people and mail from Alice Springs to Altunga by camel. Billy was not paid for his work, instead receiving tucker and clothes. Later he began pumping water for cattle, again being paid in flour, sugar and tea. He spent most of his working life in the North Eastern area of Central Australia, droving sheep and cattle for Pastoralists.
Since 1981, Billy worked at Bindi Inc, an organisation established to provide employment opportunities, support and advocacy for people living with disability in Alice Springs. During his time constructing metal boxes in the Brown Street workshop, he identified a space which became his corner to paint in. He began to visually map out his father’s country via the painted image, using old boards discarded by the Alice Springs Timber Mill. Working as many outsider artists do, with second rate materials, on any surface that appealed, Billy painted using his fingers, cloth, glue and varnish. Despite the brilliant landscapes being created, they were only shown once prior to 2000 in an exhibition of artworks done by people with a disability in the ‘Beyond Passions’ exhibition in Alice Springs.
Benn is a three-time finalist for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (2009, 2003, 2002). He has exhibited solo shows at Hele Gallery in Alice Springs, Art Leven in Redfern, and Alacaston Gallery & Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne. Benn has featured in group shows at the Potter Museum of Art, Marché aux Vins in France, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the National Gallery of Australia. He and his work are the subject of an Art Gallery of NSW Artist profile (2015) and Catherine Peattie’s 2011 book, Billy Benn.
