BORN: c 1938
REGION: KIWIRRKURRA, TJUKULA-WESTERN AUSTRALIA
LANUGUAGE GROUP: PINTUPI
View Ningura’s artwork here
Ningura Napurrula was born at Watulka, South of Kiwrrkurra. She is the widow of the famous Papunya elder and artist Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi. Ningura was part of the original group of higher-ranking women from ‘Kintore’ and ‘Kiwirrkurra’ who began painting for the famous Papunya Tula Artists, which founded the Aboriginal Art Movement in 1971.
A prolific artist with her own highly identifiable style, Ningura has become one of the strongest and well known of these painters. Ningura’s work is dynamic, abounding strong lines with powerful colour and composition. Her works normally feature a restricted palette-she uses black and white particularly to great effect. Often, as in several of her paintings, she combines this shaded combination over a red ground. Her depictions include the story for Wirrulnga, a rockhole east of Kiwirrkurra, for Papunya artists. Her painting was used as a motif for a stamp in 2003.
Her artworks focuses on the travels of her female ancestors, the sacred sites that they passed, and the mythological significance of the bush tucker that they collected.
Ningura’s designs are associated with the rock hole sites of Palturunya and Wirrulnga, east of the Kiwirrkurra Community (MT Webb) in Western Australia. The concentric circles represent rock holes and the arcs represent the higher rocky outcrops near the site.
The U-shapes represent women camped at the site .In mythological times, one old woman, Kutunga Napanangka, passed through this site during her travels towards the East. She passed through numerous sites along the way before arriving at the permanent water site of Muruntji, south of Mt Leibig. These travels and rituals help to explain the current customs and ceremonial lives of these Pintupi women.
Ningura Napurrula participated in an initial Papunya Tula Artists exhibition in 1996 and she has been featured in several group shows in Sydney, Darwin and Melbourne in 1999. She had her first solo exhibition with William Mora Aboriginal Art in 2000, and participated in the impressive Kintore Women’s Painting for the Papunya Tula retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.