Dorothy Napangardi Dorothy Napangardi is an Aboriginal artist approximately fifty years old and, as such, is part of an extension of an almost incomprehensibly old tradition. Some of the ancient rock paintings and carvings in Australia pre-date the prehistoric cave art of France and Spain.
Sandhills of Mina Mina, 2002 Napangardi is one of the 3,000 or so Warlpiri speakers who live in or are originally from the Tanami Desert region of Central Australia. She was born in the area called Mina Mina in the early ’50s and grew up at Mina Mina and in the settlement town of Yuendumu where her father is still a senior lawgiver. She has five daughters (two of them artists) and four grandchildren who live in Yuendumu and Alice Springs, the jumping-off place for the desert. She herself lives in Alice Springs and Sydney.
“When I paint,” Napangardi has said, “I think of the old days, as a happy little girl knowing my grandfather’s Dreaming.” “Dreaming” is an imprecise English translation of the Warlpiri word Jukurrpa, which describes the origins and journeys of ancestral beings in the land, and identifies the sacred spots, places in which the spirits presently reside. The Jukurrpa theme, generally, is one of the inseparability of the self from the environment, and the stories usually include traveling. In the Warlpiri culture, understanding Jukurrpa insures the perpetuation of life.
Salt on Mina Mina, 2002 In all the dozens of Aboriginal languages the words for “country” are the same as the words for “line,” and Napangardi, in making art about her country, uses lines made up of dots. Paintings from the central desert, Napangardi’s home, usually include rows of dots interspersed with broad brushstrokes and areas of bright color that define the image of a plant or an animal (or its tracks). In her early painting—the ones she made between 1987 and 199—she colorfully yet delicately evoked wild plum or bush banana plants using dots interspersed with feathery brushstrokes and petal-like forms. In 1991, one of her bush banana paintings won the Museums and Art Galleries Award for the best artwork in Western Media at the Telstra National Aboriginal Art Awards.
Sandhills, 2000 Napangardi began painting in 1987, after she had moved from her home in the outback to Alice Springs. There, she enrolled at the Institute for Aboriginal Development to learn to use Western painting materials, and in 1990 began exhibiting at Gallery Gondwana in Alice Springs (and, since 2003 in Sydney), which continues to represent her.
Yuparli (Bush Banana), 1993 (detail) Napangardi is somewhat unusual in that she has not lived in what is called the outback or the bush since she began painting. The contemporary Australian Aboriginal art movement is fueled mainly by government-sponsored art centers in the bush, and art activities at these centers are organized and executed by indigenous people with the help of government-appointed directors who provide materials and opportunities for the artists. Some galleries specializing in Aboriginal art buy it from the art centers, but there are other galleries, like Gallery Gondwana, which work directly with artists. In this movement, as in any other, there are weaker and stronger practitioners and individuality is a hallmark of the strongest. Napangardi’s work is valued especially because of its originality.
Mulga Wood Digging Sticks She began her mature work in 1998 when she put aside direct references to recognizable things and began constructing her paintings entirely of dots. In doing this, she is painting her interpretation of Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa, the Women’s Digging Stick Dreaming especially associated with her particular ancestral area. Mina Mina is significant to Warlpiri speakers as the place where digging sticks emerged from the ground and were taken up by women ancestors who danced with them across the land creating life forms and features of the land as they went. In her art, Napangardi sees the paths of the women from above (or, alternately, from close to the ground) and creates flowing interconnecting lines by accumulating dots. Lotte Waters of Gallery Gondwana says that the Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa ceremonies that Napangardi thinks of as she paints “convey vital information not only for the maintenance of cultural identity but also for the understanding of the relationship of all things.”
At the Telstra Art Awards in 2001, Dorothy Napangardi won the $40,000 “best in show” award. Her paintings command high prices (a four-foot-square canvas sells for around $20,000) and she is able to provide support for relatives in the desert. In 2004, Sotheby’s sold a painting of hers at auction for $131,725. Beyond her success in the wider artworld, Napangardi values the high regard in which she is held by her community. As Jeannie Herbert Nungarryi wrote in her introduction to Dancing Up Country, the Art of Dorothy Napangardi, the catalog for Napangardi’s solo exhibition in 2002 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney: “Warlpiri people who achieve recognition…are all part of the process of holding onto our culture, maintaining our culture for future generations. We have our own individual ways of expressing our intrinsic Warlpiri-ness.”
—Kathan Brown
Photographs from Dancing Up Country: The art of Dorothy Napangardi. Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2002.