Makinti Napanangka Australian Indigenous (Pintupi), 1930-2011

This painting depicts designs associated with the rockhole site of Lupulnga, south of the Kintore Community. The Peewee (small bird) Dreaming is associated with this site. A group of women visited this site before continuing their travels north to Kintore. The lines in the painting represent spun hair-string which is used in the making of hair-belts which are worn during the ceremonies associated with the area.

Vibrating with rhythmic free-hand striations of sunflower yellow and white, Peewee, 2002 is a mature, light-flooded work by Makinti Napanagka, painted after her vision had been restored following cataract surgery in 1999. This painting, like most in her oeuvre, refers to traditional life remembered and reestablished on country, and a sacred water source for which the artist has inherited custodianship in the temporal world. The Peewee (also known as the Magpie-lark, one of the Northern Territory’s native and protected species) is associated with an important Dreaming at the rockhole site of Lupulnga, south of the Kintore community. Lupulnga and the Peewee Tjukurrpa are one of Napangka’s principal stories, featuring often in her paintings alongside designs associated with the travels of the Kungka Kutjarra (Two Ancestral Women), who sang the land and visited the site on their way north to Kaakuratintja, Lake Macdonald. The recurring and all-over thickly painted rows of quivering lines and arcs commemorate the ceremonies at this site, particularly evoking the movement of nymparra, the hand-spun hair-string skirts worn by lead dancers, including Napanangka herself. The viscous impasto of Napanangka’s paint and its haptic texture replicate the generous application of ochre body paint in these women’s ceremonies.

Please note that all First Nations Art is created from a so called ‘Birds Eye’ view. This means that the paintings can be hung either horizontally as well as vertically.