Nyalyipi, Bush Vine, 1996

synthetic polymer paint on linen

130 x 108 cm

Est. $18,000 – $25,000

Provenance: Ngingtaka Arts, SA Kimberley Australian Aborignal Art, WA, Cat No. KAMW014/96 Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Kimberley Australian Aboriginal Art
Artwork story: In the ancestral past, a large group of women travelled to Mina Mina, the salt lake country to the west of Yuendumu, where wooden digging sticks emerged from the ground. Armed with these tools, the women moved across an expansive area of desert, driving their sticks into the earth to create sacred sites and freshwater springs. Their paths and resting places are what the painting maps: the sinuous lines are tracks of travel, the rounded oval forms the sites created along the way, the vertical elements the digging sticks that made country as they moved. Sinuous lines of white dotting weave the full height of this canvas, each tracing the path of an ancestral woman between sites. The oval forms they connect vary in palette, moving between warm ochre, pale cream, sky blue and deep teal against a richly worked ground of warm brown, green and dark tonal passages. The colour range is notably diverse, consistent with the vibrant late works Napangardi Watson produced after leaving Yuendumu for Adelaide, large-scale paintings with a bold and expansive palette that attracted serious collector attention when they first appeared in Melbourne in the mid-1990s. Napangardi Watson was a mainstay of the Yuendumu community when the local art cooperative was established in 1985. Unlike Papunya, where painting was restricted to men in its early years, women were at the forefront of the school that flourished at Yuendumu. Her traditional lands lay to the west, centred on the salt lakes of Mina Mina, country she shared with fellow Warlpiri painter Dorothy Napangardi, whose work also appears in this Catalogue.

Catalogues170 of 257

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Sale 3 · Lot 22

Maggie Watson Napangardi

c.1925 – 2004

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

Nyalyipi, Bush Vine, 1996

synthetic polymer paint on linen

130 x 108 cm

Est. $18,000 – $25,000

Provenance: Ngingtaka Arts, SA Kimberley Australian Aborignal Art, WA, Cat No. KAMW014/96 Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Kimberley Australian Aboriginal Art
Artwork story: In the ancestral past, a large group of women travelled to Mina Mina, the salt lake country to the west of Yuendumu, where wooden digging sticks emerged from the ground. Armed with these tools, the women moved across an expansive area of desert, driving their sticks into the earth to create sacred sites and freshwater springs. Their paths and resting places are what the painting maps: the sinuous lines are tracks of travel, the rounded oval forms the sites created along the way, the vertical elements the digging sticks that made country as they moved. Sinuous lines of white dotting weave the full height of this canvas, each tracing the path of an ancestral woman between sites. The oval forms they connect vary in palette, moving between warm ochre, pale cream, sky blue and deep teal against a richly worked ground of warm brown, green and dark tonal passages. The colour range is notably diverse, consistent with the vibrant late works Napangardi Watson produced after leaving Yuendumu for Adelaide, large-scale paintings with a bold and expansive palette that attracted serious collector attention when they first appeared in Melbourne in the mid-1990s. Napangardi Watson was a mainstay of the Yuendumu community when the local art cooperative was established in 1985. Unlike Papunya, where painting was restricted to men in its early years, women were at the forefront of the school that flourished at Yuendumu. Her traditional lands lay to the west, centred on the salt lakes of Mina Mina, country she shared with fellow Warlpiri painter Dorothy Napangardi, whose work also appears in this Catalogue.