Marrapinti, 2012, Naata Nungurrayi
Synthetic polymer paint on linen, 150cm x 120cm
Provenance: Yanda Aboriginal Art, Alice Springs.
A significant figure in the Indigenous art movement, Naata Nungurrayi, started painting along with a wave of Papaya Tula female artists in the mid-90s. Her works capture the memory of the desert homelands of her youth in Western Australia, the land that she and her family were forced to leave. Nungurrayi’s painting style draws upon the geometric patterns of male artists of the community, with the organic and looser female approach. Now in her seventies, Naata is one of the leading Kintore women artists and a respected elder within the Pintupi tribal group (1).
From the authenticity certificate: This painting depicts the events that took place at the site of Marrapinti, west of Kiwirrkura. The painting depicts an aerial perspective of Naata’s homeland. The natural appearance of the topography is translated into a vision of dream state. The orientation of the sand dunes and rock escarpments is represented as a grid pattern of vegetation and landscape features. The Pintupi people believe that the ancestral beings formed the land and environment. Each physical feature of the landscape represents the evidence of activities during the time of creation and these locations become important ceremony sites.