Ningura Napurrula

Painted at Kintore for Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, in 2003 (catalogue number NN 0310339)

Private collects ion, acquired from the above with the assistance of Tim Klingender Replica Handbags , Sydney

Ningura Napurrula was a mainstay of the Papunya Tula Artists cooperative since she first assisted her late husband, Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi (circa 1924-1998), who was one of the original members of the painting group in the early 1970s, to infill dotted sections of his paintings. Ningura came into her own by 1995 during a Papunya inspired project aimed at promoting women artists through a series of painting workshops at Haasts Bluff and Kintore. Within a year after she painted Untitled (Women's birthing site of Wirrulnga), 2003, Napurrula was one of eight Aboriginal artists commissioned to create a site-specific work for the Musée du quai Branly when it opened in 2006.

This work depicts a desert landscape where the larger roundels represent Wirrulnga, the camping place of a group of women ancestors on their way east. One woman belonging to the Napaltjarri sub-section was pregnant and gave birth here. The arched forms around the sides of the canvas and across the middle represent sandhills, while the small roundels refer to the desert raisin, kampurarrpa, and pura, a bush tomato. Creeks flow through the area.

The surface of this painting is visually tactile, typical of Napurrula’s technique which is an adaptation of the traditional mode of storytelling through a palimpsest of drawings in the ground or sand. The scale of the painting suggests the vastness of the place and forms jostle against each other to evoke a sense of contrast in the landscape, apparently flat and barren, but rich in physical resources and spiritual nourishment.