Judy Napangardi Watson | 'Mina Mina Jukurrpa, 2010' | 152x30cm

Code: DD196610

Artist: judy napangardi watson

Title: Mina Mina Jukurrpa

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 152x30cm

Year: 2010

This tall, ribbon-like canvas pulses with the rhythm of Mina Mina Jukurrpa, the ancestral narrative of a sacred women's site west of the Tanami Desert, country deeply connected to the Napangardi/Napanangka women of the Warlpiri. From Mina Mina, ancestral women travelled east, gathering digging sticks that rose from the ground, dancing and singing the country into being as they journeyed.

The composition reads vertically, a current of movement that mirrors the women's path across the desert. Sinuous lines undulate down the canvas in ochres, turquoise, deep blue and white, evoking the tracks of feet, the drag of digging sticks, and the soft folds of sandhill country. Concentric ovals and lozenge shapes cluster along this central spine, these are the women themselves, gathered at mulju (waterholes) and resting places, or the seeds and bush foods harvested along the way. Toward the lower half, the colour intensifies into jewel-bright clusters of red, yellow and emerald, each form ringed with carefully dotted halos that vibrate against their neighbours.

The artist's signature technique, a dragged, raked application of paint loaded with two or three colours at once, gives every line a textural shimmer. Edges blur, hues bleed into one another, and the surface seems to breathe. It is a hallmark of her practice: the refusal of flat, static dotting in favour of a kinetic, almost choreographic mark-making that carries the cadence of song and dance into pigment.

Mina Mina Jukurrpa is among the most celebrated of Warlpiri women's stories, and works of this scale and vertical orientation invite the viewer to travel the canvas as the ancestors travelled the land, top to bottom, waterhole to waterhole, in an unbroken line of memory, country and custodianship.