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Dorothy Napangardi |
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| Dorothy Napangardi is a Warlpiri woman from Mina Mina, a significant women's site in a remote area of the Northern Territory. Her works have featured in exhibitions throughout Australia, the U.S.A. and Europe where she is regarded as one of the leading artists of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement. Dorothy's paintings are highly sought after by both collectors and curators worldwide. In 1991 she won the Best Painting in European Media, 8th National Aboriginal Art Award; in 1998 the Northern Territory Art Award; and she was "Highly Commended" for the 16th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award in 1999. In 2001 Dorothy won the 18th National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award, presented by Telstra, with her spectacular black and white painting titled, "Salt on Mina Mina". Napangardi's paintings adorn the walls of institutions such as The Australia Council; the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, Germany and the Kelton Foundation in Santa Monica, U.S.A. Dorothy's paintings are created by an intricate network of lines that collide and implode on top of each other creating a play of tension and expansion, transporting the viewer through a myriad of intersections. Her view is constantly changing: one painting giving an aerial perspective; the next as if she has placed a microscope to the ground. Dorothy now resides in Alice Springs where she paints full time in her own studio at Gallery Gondwana Karntakurlangu is one of the most extensive and significant women's Jukurrpa (dreaming) belonging to the Warlpiri. The works by Dorothy Napangardi depict the ceremonial site of origin for the Jukurrpa, known as Mina Mina, the artist's custodial country, located near Lake Mackay in the Tanami Desert, north of Yuendumu in the Northern Territory. During the creation era ancestral women of the Napangardi and Napanangka sub-section groups (aunt / niece relationship, in which knowledge is passed from one generation to another) gathered to perform the ceremonies and take-up ceremonial digging sticks (kuturu) that had emerged from the ground. A large belt of Eucalyptus trees (Casuarina Decaisneana) now stand where these digging sticks emerged from the ground. The Jukurrpa women then preceded east transiting the vast expanse of Walpiri tribal land, performing rituals of song and dance, creating the environment as it is today. The women travel across the landscape, stopping to hunt, dance and sing. As each reconnects both individually and together with their place the traveling tracks converge and coalesce. It is here that we find the key to Warlpiri art - it is the journey that encompasses the creation and thereafter the renewal of the country and ones connection to the land. |
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