Mitjili Napurrula | 'Watiya Tjuta, 2014' | 40x60cm

Code: DDMN14001

Artist: Mitjili Napurrula

Title: Watiya Tjuta

Area: Haasts Bluff (Ikuntji), NT

Community: Pintupi / Luritja

Medium: Acrylic On Linen Board

Size: 40x60cm

Year: 2014

Watiya Tjuta is Mitjili Napurrula's signature design, painted and repainted across three decades at the Ikuntji Women's Centre at Haasts Bluff. The subject is the stand of spearwood and mulga trees at Ilyingaungau, in her father's country, where men once cut and straightened the shafts used for spears. Her mother, Tjunkiya Napaltjarri, first showed her the design by drawing it in the sand, and Napurrula carried it forward as her own, translating a place of men's work into a bold and entirely personal visual language that she returned to again and again.

Mitjili Napurrula was one of the defining painters of the Ikuntji Women's Centre at Haasts Bluff, and among the most graphically distinctive artists of the Western Desert. Born around 1945, she was the daughter of Tupa Tjakamarra and the painter Tjunkiya Napaltjarri, the sister of Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, a founding figure and later chairman of Papunya Tula Artists, and the wife of the painter Long Tom Tjapanangka. She began painting in 1992, when the Women's Centre opened at Haasts Bluff, and quickly established a signature subject she would return to for the rest of her career: Watiya Tjuta, the stands of spearwood and mulga trees at Ilyingaungau in her father's country, from which men cut and straightened spear shafts. Her mother taught her the design by drawing it in the sand, and Napurrula rendered it as bold, upright, brush-drawn tree forms marching across fields of red, ochre, yellow and black. The restraint and rhythm of these paintings set her apart from her contemporaries, and her exhibitions regularly sold out. She won the Alice Springs Art Prize in 1999 and was included in the 2000 Adelaide Biennial.