ABOUT THE ARTIST

Dorothy Napangardi spent her early childhood living a nomadic life at Mina Mina near Lake Mackay in the Tanami Desert during the late 1950s and early 1960s. This idyllic life came to a close when her family was forcibly relocated to the government settlement at Yuendumu. When Dorothy married, she moved to Alice Springs and bore him four daughters and later, after the marriage eventually broke down, gave birth to her youngest child, Annette, by another man. It was here, in Alice Springs in 1987, that she began painting.

Dorothy’s early artistic endeavors were heavily influenced by memories of her childhood. Her subject matter was principally the Bush Plum and Bush Banana, wild fruits that grow in abundance near Mina Mina, changing in color as they ripen, which she mirrored in her depictions.

The paintings, at such an early stage in her career, clearly marked Dorothy as an artist of great talent. Her superb sense of composition created a rhythmic effect as semi-naturalistic depictions were entwined in an altogether geometric formation.
In 1990, Dorothy began painting exclusively for the Premont gallery, the environment and financial security that was provided enabled Dorothy to experiment freely and develop her artistic repertoire rapidly and the relationship that developed lasted up until her tragic death in 2013. Dorothy created works that drew on her innate visual consciousness, developed during those early years spent in the vast unlimited expanses of the desert.

From 1997 onward, Dorothy began producing works which traced the grid-like patterns of the salt encrustations on the Mina Mina clay pans marking a significant artistic shift in her work. Over three years, her paintings became less and less contrived and increasingly spare, all detail pared back to the barest essentials. These new works, in which Dorothy began to explore the Women’s Digging Sticks Dreaming and other stories related to the travels of the Karntakurlangu, compel the spectator's eye to dance across the painted surface, just as these ancestral women danced in the hundreds across the country during the region's creation.

Dancing digging sticks magically emerged from the ground at Mina Mina, equipping the large band of women for their travels over a vast stretch of country. The tall desert oaks which are found there today symbolize the emergence of the digging sticks that rose up from beneath the ground itself. As these works developed, her extraordinary spatial ability enabled her to create mimetic grids of the salt encrustations across the claypans of Mina Mina.

The lines of white dots trace the travels of her female ancestors as they danced their way, in joyous exultation, through the saltpans, spinifex and sandhills, clutching their digging sticks in their outstretched hands.

Little wonder then, that the surfaces of Dorothy’s canvases become dense rhythms of grids, as she mapped the paths of these dancing women. In 2001 Dorothy Napangardi was the recipient of the 18th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award and in the following year a solo exhibition of her work was curated for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.