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Lot Essay
'.. there are a number of soakages on Mina Mina. The salt lakes are on the western side - they are extraordinarily white There is a large holeon this Mina Mina site. It looks like a deep excavation in the Dreaming the water found there was fine to drink, beautiful water, fresh and clear - not salty like now.'
Dorothy Napangardi's father Paddy Lewis Japanangka, described the site of this large, lyrical painting by his daughter in Dancing up Country, the Art of Dorothy Napangardi, Sydney, 2002, p. 22.
A year after Napangardi painted this work she won the prestigious National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award with a similarly striking black and white painting. Napangardi's works relate the stories of the women's digging stick site at Mina Mina, others such as this, pertain to the site itself - reflecting both the look of the salt-encrusted land with its glittering grainy surfaces and the stories of the ancestral women who tracked it.
Mina Mina, on the border of Warlpiri and Kukatja lands is about 320 kilometres north west of Alice Springs south of The Granites mine and near Lake Mackay. Born in the bush near Mina Mina, Napangardi moved to Alice Springs with her parents as a child - only revisiting her homelands in the late 1990s after she had been painting for about 10 years. The trip had a profound effect on her work, reducing its colours to black background over which streams of fine white dots emulate the crusty cracks in the ground while tracing significant women's sites and paths.
Napangardi's geometric abstraction is underpinned by the rhythm of song and dance cycle and the coding of Dreaming stories. Evident in this painting, it was these qualities combined with her prowess as a painter which lead Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art to offer her a solo survey exhibition in 2002.
Susan McCulloch
Dorothy Napangardi's father Paddy Lewis Japanangka, described the site of this large, lyrical painting by his daughter in Dancing up Country, the Art of Dorothy Napangardi, Sydney, 2002, p. 22.
A year after Napangardi painted this work she won the prestigious National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award with a similarly striking black and white painting. Napangardi's works relate the stories of the women's digging stick site at Mina Mina, others such as this, pertain to the site itself - reflecting both the look of the salt-encrusted land with its glittering grainy surfaces and the stories of the ancestral women who tracked it.
Mina Mina, on the border of Warlpiri and Kukatja lands is about 320 kilometres north west of Alice Springs south of The Granites mine and near Lake Mackay. Born in the bush near Mina Mina, Napangardi moved to Alice Springs with her parents as a child - only revisiting her homelands in the late 1990s after she had been painting for about 10 years. The trip had a profound effect on her work, reducing its colours to black background over which streams of fine white dots emulate the crusty cracks in the ground while tracing significant women's sites and paths.
Napangardi's geometric abstraction is underpinned by the rhythm of song and dance cycle and the coding of Dreaming stories. Evident in this painting, it was these qualities combined with her prowess as a painter which lead Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art to offer her a solo survey exhibition in 2002.
Susan McCulloch