Dorothy Napangardi | 'Mina Mina, 2012' | 182x244cm

Code: DN201008

Artist: Dorothy Napangardi

Title: Mina Mina

Area: Mina Mina, Tanami Desert, NT

Community: Warlpiri

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 182x244cm

Year: 2012

Dorothy Napangardi's Mina Mina paintings return again and again to a women's Dreaming site far west of Yuendumu, on the edge of the Tanami and Gibson Deserts. The Jukurrpa tells of ancestral Napanangka and Napangardi women who travelled east from Mina Mina, dancing and performing ceremony as they went, carrying karlangu digging sticks and gathering bush tucker along the way. Their journey shaped the sandhills, salt pans and tracks of the country, and it is this walked, danced landscape that Napangardi returns to in canvas after canvas, stripped back to its essential structure.

Dorothy Napangardi was one of the most original painters to emerge from Central Australia, and the artist who did most to push Warlpiri painting toward pure abstraction. Born around 1950 at Mina Mina in the Tanami Desert, she grew up at Yuendumu and later settled in Alice Springs, beginning to paint in 1987 alongside senior women including Eunice Napangardi. Her early works depicted bush plum and bush banana in a warm, conventional palette, but from the late 1990s she stripped her painting back to a taut lattice of white dots on black, a shimmering field that maps the salt encrustations, sandhills and ancestral tracks of her mother's country at Mina Mina. In 2001 she won first prize at the 18th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award for Salt on Mina Mina, and in 2002 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney mounted the survey exhibition Dancing Up Country. Her paintings hold their own in a contemporary international context while remaining wholly grounded in Jukurrpa, and she is now regarded as a major figure of late twentieth-century Australian art.