LANGUAGE GROUP: WARLPRI
REGION: YUENDUMU, ALICE SPRINGS- NORTHERN TERRITORY
View Dorothy’s artwork here
Born in the Mina Mina area of Tanami Desert, Dorothy Robinson commenced painting in 1987 and in her art often refers to her traditional country of Mina Mina, Northern Territory.
Dorothy Robinson belongs to the Warlpri language group from Pikilyi. During the Jukurrpa (The Dream Time), ancestral women of the Napagardi and Napanangka subsection groups gathered to collect ceremonial digging sticks, kutura that emerged from the ground. They then proceed east, performing rituals of song and dance, to the place known as Jankinyi. A large velt of eucalyptus trees, Casuarina Decaisneana, now stand where these digging sticks once were.
The rendition of her paintings is characterised by the way she minimises all references to the customary Aboriginal iconography. Topographically, the sacred site of Mina Mina is made up of two enormous soakage areas that rarely fill with water, exist as clay pans. As water soaks into the ground, small areas of earth dry out and life at the edges, becoming delineated by salt. In her paintings of Mina Mina her striking design of white dotting, Dorothy depicts the encrustations of salt stretching infinitely onward, etched with the tracks of women as their paths stretch on, crossing and merging, telling her stories. The artist’s fascination with rigid geometrics coupled with linear movement pulls the eye of the viewer up and down, inwards and outwards, pushing it from one point to the next.