Lorna Napanangka

This artist was born in Haasts Bluff in 1962. Her mother worked in Papunya when she was still a child and she went to school with a certain Geoffrey Bardon as a teacher… the very one who was at the origin of the artistic movement aboriginal in the Central Desert in 1971. Her aunt is the famous artist Pansy Napangardi, one of the first female artists, and her husband Bobby West Tjupurrula, a painter who has gained prominence in recent years. She has been painting since the end of the 1990s. Her very rich, very complex style, for an artist living in Kiwirrkurra, contrasts with the production of other artists from the Western Desert. Success quickly met with two personal exhibitions organized by a prestigious gallery. Its particularity is to describe several sacred sites on the same canvas, something very rare in Aboriginal art. We have thus a very large area of the Western Desert mapped, and whose history is told to us in a symbolic way. Each part of the canvas would be the subject of another artist's painting. It is notably inspired by the designs associated with the Warren Creek site just west of the community of Mt Liebig. It is the “country” of his grandfather where one finds rocks and water points. The patterns symbolize the creeks (dry rivers), rocks, water points, dunes that surround this region. In Dream Time, a large group of Ancestor Women camped there collecting berries and fruits including wild grapes, wild figs, wild bananas and wild tomatoes. They also dug the ground looking for honey ants and caterpillars. But it also describes the caves and dunes of the Marrapinti site, west of the Pollock mountains. A large group of Ancestor Women, from the Nangala and Napangati subgroups, passed through there during the Dreamtime. They continued on their way to the east, passing through Wala Wala, Kiwirrkura or Ngaminya. They made nose sticks in Marrapinti and collected berries and seeds. Collections: National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, Griffith University Art Coll,…