Women's Ceremony, 1998

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

121.5 x 60 cm

Est. $4,000 – $6,000

Hammer $6,000

Provenance: Gallery Gondwana, Alice Springs, NT, Cat No. DN3095 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Melbourne, Vic, Cat No. AGOD7369 Ebes Collection, Vic Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings
Artwork story: Mina Mina is where the Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa begins. At this women's ceremonial site near Lake Mackay in the Tanami Desert, ancestral women of the Napangardi and Napanangka skin groups gathered, took up digging sticks that had emerged from the ground, and danced eastward through the country. A stand of desert oaks now marks the place where those sticks rose. Napangardi was born at Mina Mina in the early 1950s, the daughter of a Pintupi father and a Warlpiri mother, and spent her early childhood there. In 1957 a patrol officer pressured the family to move to Yuendumu. She eventually settled in Alice Springs, where she began painting in 1987. The decisive shift came around 1997 when she returned to Mina Mina for the first time in years. This canvas belongs to the very opening of that transformation. Two focal points anchor the composition, one in the upper third and one in the lower, from which fine white dots radiate outward in dense concentric arcs across a warm red-brown ground. The surface is built up with extraordinary patience, the dotting layered until the canvas holds a physical weight. Writing in the Catalogue for Dancing Up Country: The Art of Dorothy Napangardi, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2002, Christine Nicholls described Napangardi's achievement as lying in her ability to evoke a strong sense of movement on her canvases, an effect she achieves because of her remarkable spatial sense and compositional ability. Here the country is alive with the passage of ancestral women. Her work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Sale 3 · Lot 101

Dorothy Robinson Napangardi

c.1950 / 1956 – 2013

Region: Central Desert & Tanami
Community: Yuendumu
Language group: Warlpiri

Women's Ceremony, 1998

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

121.5 x 60 cm

Est. $4,000 – $6,000

Hammer $6,000

Provenance: Gallery Gondwana, Alice Springs, NT, Cat No. DN3095 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Melbourne, Vic, Cat No. AGOD7369 Ebes Collection, Vic Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings
Artwork story: Mina Mina is where the Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa begins. At this women's ceremonial site near Lake Mackay in the Tanami Desert, ancestral women of the Napangardi and Napanangka skin groups gathered, took up digging sticks that had emerged from the ground, and danced eastward through the country. A stand of desert oaks now marks the place where those sticks rose. Napangardi was born at Mina Mina in the early 1950s, the daughter of a Pintupi father and a Warlpiri mother, and spent her early childhood there. In 1957 a patrol officer pressured the family to move to Yuendumu. She eventually settled in Alice Springs, where she began painting in 1987. The decisive shift came around 1997 when she returned to Mina Mina for the first time in years. This canvas belongs to the very opening of that transformation. Two focal points anchor the composition, one in the upper third and one in the lower, from which fine white dots radiate outward in dense concentric arcs across a warm red-brown ground. The surface is built up with extraordinary patience, the dotting layered until the canvas holds a physical weight. Writing in the Catalogue for Dancing Up Country: The Art of Dorothy Napangardi, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2002, Christine Nicholls described Napangardi's achievement as lying in her ability to evoke a strong sense of movement on her canvases, an effect she achieves because of her remarkable spatial sense and compositional ability. Here the country is alive with the passage of ancestral women. Her work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.