Dorothy Napangardi | 'Mina Mina, 2013' | 90x120cm

Code: DNA9543

Artist: dorothy napangardi

Title: Mina Mina

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 90x120cm

Year: 2013

Mina Mina is the country that sat at the centre of Dorothy Napangardi's life as a painter. It lies west of Yuendumu, a salt pan and claypan landscape held by Warlpiri women. Napangardi returned to it again and again on canvas, mapping its surface in fields of white dots on black.

Here the dots gather into lines. The lines bend, cross and pull apart. Read one way, they suggest the cracked crust of a salt lake after the water has gone. Read another, they trace the paths walked by ancestral women through this country, the same paths Napangardi knew on foot.

The grid is never quite a grid. It tilts. It swells in places and thins in others. Stand close and the surface becomes a shimmer of small marks made one at a time. Step back and the whole canvas seems to breathe, as if seen from above at altitude.

Napangardi was celebrated for this kind of work. She stripped colour back to its barest contrast and let structure do the talking. The discipline is extraordinary. Every dot carries weight, and the rhythm between them holds the painting together.

What you are looking at is country rendered as pure pattern. It is also a record of attention, of one woman holding a place in mind and translating it, mark by mark, into something a viewer can stand in front of and feel.