Dorothy Napangardi

Salt on Mina Mina by Australian Aboriginal Artist Dorothy Napangardi

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. She recalled camping at claypans and soakages with her mother, Jeanie Lewis Napururrla, learning to collect the plentiful bush tucker and grinding seeds for damper cooked on hot ashes. This idyllic life came to a close when her family was forcibly relocated to the government settlement at Yuendumu. 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 colour 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 the late 1980s, the government marketing company Aboriginal Arts Australia closed its Alice Springs outlet and its manager Roslyn Premont opened her own, Gallery Gondwana. 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 a three-year period, 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 symbolise the emergence of the digging sticks that literally rose up out 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. 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. Dorothy’s paintings have enjoyed considerable commercial success. Creating these paintings has in no way undermined her personal integrity. While Dorothy Napangardi’s paintings may be seen as important commodities and major investments, her work can be so beautiful and ethereal, as to border on the sublime.