Eubena Nampitjin

Painted for Warlayirti Artists, Wirrimanu (Balgo Hills), 2008 (catalogue number 702/08)

Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne

The Clemenger Collection, Melbourne

Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne

Private Collection, Sydney

Eubena Nampitjin was born in the early 1920s at Tjinjalpa with white spirit-dog Dreaming. Raised in the desert she was trained in maparn (shaman) and desert expertise by her mother and uncles. After working with her husband for drovers on the Canning Stock Route her own family followed the Pallotine missionaries before settling at old Balgo mission on the eastern edge of the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia. The mission moved to Balgo Hills (Wirumanu) in 1965 where Warlayirti Artists would emerge two decades later.

Following Papunya’s earlier lead, Balgo men began to put their mytho- topographical iconography on canvas in the late 1970s and by the early 1980s the movement had gathering momentum with woman picking up the brush. Eubena soon began painting on canvas with her second husband, Wimitji Tjapanardi, and in 1986 was represented in the Art from the Great Sandy Desert exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Her early paintings, made alongside Wimitji, pixelate in sync with the delicate lacing and complexity of his signature works. In the latter 80s the dramatic and individual styles of remarkable emerging husband and wife duos such as Sunfly/Bai Bai, Muntja/Mosquito, Bootja/ Gill, and Ningie/Tjumpo did much to propel women to the forefront of the Western desert art movement. Their portrayal of living country with beauty, drama, excitement and mystery, draws on a traditional aesthetic cannon of ceremony, affirming their cultural identity of homelands. 

Eubena’s own more gestural style developed throughout the 1990s.  Gradually her detailed cartographic 80s works of darker outlines contrasting fire colours and white dot embellishment, unfurled to a more opulent and liberal configuration of plump dunes in orange, red and pink. Segments of these press up close and petal out from waterhole clusters and ancestral generation.  A growing immediacy and sumptuousness of paint formed by dabbing rhythmic procession, becomes her signature, while her late works merge and dissolve in effusions of white. Midjul 2008 is a magnificent example from the cusp of this phase. Saturated fields and alternate strokes in gold and honey strike up a humming vibrancy of undulating ground. This is how the world is when no one makes measurements, simply fields occupying space, relational, only waves. Here are the constellations of continuous trackings of her brush; percussion that mesmorise and articulate the way; the beat and stitch of time. Midul reveals the upwelling notes of deep artesian lakes and rivers - these piercings are centres of life to which everything returns, murmuration light ripples, soft padding paws and sure footfall to source. Eubena’s paintings encode and transmit this ecological and aesthetic intelligence drawing on a deep ancient repository.

Long regarded as Queen of the Balgo art movement, she became the lead artist of the Warlayirti art centre. Eubena had her first solo exhibition at Alcaston Gallery in 1998, winning the Telstra Open Painting Award the same year. Her work is well represented in collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gantner Myer Collection, Sprengel Museum in Hanover, the Kluge Ruhe Collection, Virginia, House of World Cultures, the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen, and the Singapore Art Museum.

Dr. Erica Izett

Dr. Erica Izett is an independent curator who worked as Art Co-ordinator at Warlayirti Artists from 1999-2002

This painting is sold with the Warlayirtu Artists certificate which states:

"Eubena has painted some of her country south west of Balgo along the middle stretches of the Canning Stock Route. The majority of the painting shows the tali (sandhills) that dominate this country. The central circle is tjurrnu (soakwater) named Midjul. This is the country where Kinyu the spirit dog lives. Eubena would often cover Midjul with leaves so Kinyu wouldn't come out and would also leave gifts of goanna for Kinyu."

Image Credits

Eubena Nampitjin at Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne 2004 © The Estate of the Artist, Warlayirti Artists and Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne; © Photo - The Herald Sun