Ningura Napurrula

Painted for Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, in 2009 (catalogue number NN0909008)

Untitled, 2009, is offered for sale directly from the archives of Papunya Tula Artists, the artists’ cooperative based in Alice Springs. Ningura Napurrula was a mainstay of the cooperative since she first assisted her late husband, Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi (circa 1924-1998) who was one of the original members of the cooperative in the early 1970s, to infill dotted sections of his paintings. Ningura came into her own by 1995 through a Papunya inspired project aimed at promoting women artists through a series of painting workshops at Haasts Bluff and Kintore. Within a few years she had developed her distinctive style. The richly tactile impasto surfaces of her paintings owe their inspiration to the practice of drawing in the sand or ground, a traditional form of story-telling where each episode or scene is superimposed upon the previous in a palimpsest of narratives. The recurring theme of Ningura Napurrula’s paintings is the celebration of a women’s birthing site on her traditional country at Wirrulnga, a rocky outcrop east of the Pintupi settlement of Kiwirrkura. In this work, the bold horizontals symbolise the distended belly of an ancestral woman of the Napaltjarri subsection who gave birth at Wirrulnga.

In 2004, Ningura Napurrula was one of eight Aboriginal artists commissioned to create a site-specific work for then new Musée du quai Branly when it opened in 2006.