Biography

Pintupi, c. 1932–2021 Naata Nungurrayi was a senior Pintupi artist and Elder whose work emerged from a life grounded in the Country, ceremony and cultural knowledge of the Western Desert. She was born at Kumil, west of the Pollock Hills in Western Australia, and spent her early life travelling with her family across the Gibson Desert. She later lived at Papunya and Kintore, returning closer to her ancestral lands as Pintupi communities moved westward. Naata began painting in the mid-1990s, when she was already in her sixties. Her authority within her community allowed her to paint an unusually broad range of subjects, including women’s ceremonial sites and aspects of the Tingari cycle. Country and Tjukurrpa A central subject in Naata’s work is Marrapinti, a significant women’s site west of Kiwirrkurra. Her paintings refer to ancestral women travelling through this Country, gathering at water sources and participating in ceremonies associated with the site. She also painted places including Karrkurutinjinya and Karilywarra, together with elements of the Tingari cycle: an extensive body of songs, stories and ceremonies concerning ancestral beings whose journeys shaped the Western Desert. The meanings contained within these works operate at several levels, with restricted cultural knowledge remaining protected. Style and Technique Naata developed a strong visual language based on repeated lines, concentric forms, roundels and fields of carefully placed dots. These elements often suggest journeys, ceremonial activity, waterholes and the contours of Country without functioning as literal maps. Her compositions range from densely layered fields of dotting to more open arrangements of bold linear forms. Rather than creating a fixed foreground and background, she allowed motifs to move across and through one another, producing paintings with a pronounced sense of rhythm and spatial depth. Late in her life, Naata developed her Iconography series, stripping her imagery back to large black lines painted over ruby-red grounds. The series marked a significant departure from the densely dotted surfaces of her earlier work while retaining the underlying structures of her cultural narratives. Ten panels from this body of work are held in the Australian National University Art Collection. Australian National University Palette Naata worked across a broad palette. Many paintings use desert reds, ochres, black and white, while others introduce pink, orange, yellow, green and violet. Colour is often organised in distinct bands or concentrated around key forms, reinforcing the movement and internal structure of the composition. For the Collector Naata’s work is held in major Australian public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. One of her paintings was reproduced on an Australia Post stamp in 2003 as part of a series recognising the Papunya Tula art movement. Her paintings form an important part of the history of Pintupi women’s painting, combining cultural authority with a distinctive and continually evolving visual language.