Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett) | 'Punkilpirri, 0000' | 71x56cm

Code: DDNN001

Artist: Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett)

Title: Punkilpirri

Area: Kintore (Walungurru), NT

Community: Pintupi

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 71x56cm

Year: 0000

Punkilpirri is a rockhole and soakage site within Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa's own country, one of the waterholes that thread through the Gibson Desert where she spent her childhood. For the Pintupi, these soakages are marked in ceremony and carried in the body-paint designs of the senior women, and Nampitjinpa returned to them again and again in her painting, translating the site's shape and the memory of gathering water there into broad, confident fields of black, cream and red.

Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa, known throughout the art world as Mrs Bennett, was among the most individual of the senior Pintupi women painters. Born around 1935 in country near Docker River, she spent her childhood in the Gibson Desert around the rockholes at Pangkupirri before moving east, eventually settling at Kintore. She came to painting in the mid-1990s, and was one of the founding participants in the Haasts Bluff and Kintore Women's Painting Camp established in 1994, the project that launched a generation of Western Desert women artists. Painting for Papunya Tula Artists and later working extensively with the private studio Yanda Art, she developed a style of striking assurance: broad, gestural fields of black and pale cream set against deep red grounds, their rhythms derived from ceremonial body-painting design. Her subjects were her mother's Dreamings, women's ceremony, the rockhole and soakage sites of her country, and the gathering of desert raisin and quandong. She was named among Australia's fifty most collectable artists in 2001 and again in 2011, and her work entered the major state and national collections during her lifetime.