Walangkura Napanangka | 'Womens Ceremony, 2010' | 180x300cm

Code: DDWN10001

Artist: Walangkura Napanangka

Title: Womens Ceremony

Area: Kintore

Community: Pintupi

Size: 180x300cm

Year: 2010

Walangkura Napanangka's Womens Ceremony paintings emerge from a defining moment in her artistic life: the historic 1994 women's collaborative painting project at Kintore, when the senior women of the community gathered away from the eyes of men and outsiders to sing, dance and paint the stories of their own country. These were not illustrations of ceremony so much as its residue on canvas — marks laid down in the same spirit of gathering, the same rhythm of bodies moving together across sand and cloth. The works that emerged were immediately recognisable for their exuberance, radiating what has been described as the felt heartbeat of women's affinity to country.

Walangkura Napanangka (c.1946–2014) belonged to the last generation of Pintupi people to know a childhood lived entirely in the desert. Born at Tjitururrnga, west of Kintore, in the remote country between the Northern Territory and Western Australia, she grew up travelling, hunting and gathering with her family across the homelands west of the salt lake Karrkurutinjinya (Lake Macdonald). As a teenager she walked with her family for hundreds of kilometres to the settlements of Haasts Bluff and Papunya, travelling with Uta Uta Tjangala's group. In 1981, when the outstation movement began, she moved west again to Kintore.

Her life as a painter took shape in 1994. That year the senior women of Kintore began a collaborative painting project to reaffirm their spiritual and ancestral ties to country. Held apart from men and outsiders, it was a time of women's song, ceremony and painting, and the canvases it produced were described as "alive with the ritual excitement and narrative intensity of the occasion" (Johnson 2000). Within a year Papunya Tula Artists had taken on many of these women as full-time painters. Walangkura went on to become one of the company's most senior women artists.

Her early paintings, from 1996, cover large fields of canvas with dense, small marks. The deep sandy orange she favoured dominates them, set against black, red and muted greens and yellows. Her later work became more gestural but stayed tightly packed with linear forms. These lines describe sandhills, rockholes, the journeys of ancestral women and the shifting light of the desert. Many of these paintings are monumental in scale, and they carry the confidence of an artist painting from a lifetime of knowing her country.

She held solo exhibitions at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, in 2003 and at Utopia Art Sydney in 2004. Her paintings are now regarded as defining examples of Pintupi women's art.