BORN: 1958
LANGUAGE GROUP:
REGION: Pintupi
View Maisie’s artwork here
Maisie Campbell Napaltjarri is a Pintupi artist born in 1958 near Haasts Bluff, about 300 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs, Northern Territory.
She spent her formative years at Papunya during the early years of the art movement. As a young woman in the 1980s, she was among the Pintupi who returned to their family homelands when the community of Kintore was established 500 kilometres west of Alice Springs.
Napaltjarri started to paint for Papunya Tula in the early 1990s. (Prior to this she had worked on the background dotting of her husband’s paintings.) She uses traditional motifs such as concentric circles (significant sites), travelling lines (routes taken by ancestors), large half circles (sandhills) and U shapes (people). Napaltjarri paints women’s stories and Tingari for her mother and father’s respective countries. They include Yalka (bush onion), Kampurarrpa (bush tomato) and Kunga Tjurkurpa (women’s stories).
Maisie Campbell Napaltjarri paints the Tjukurrpa, or Dreamings, that have been handed down in her family line for countless generations. The Tjukurrpa depict the sites associated with women’s ceremonies referred to as Minyma Inmaku. These sites are located in the area between Kintore and Kiwirrkurra in Western Australia, and Maisie paints them in aerial perspective, showing the elements of the country that are sacred for her people. Many of the sacred rockholes in the Kintore region are maintained as important ceremonial sites by Pintupi people. Kapi is the Pintupi word used to refer to water, and the location of these sites is critical to both the physical and spiritual survival of the Western Desert people.