Portrait Dorothy Napangardi Dorothy Napangardi was born in the early 1950s in the Mina Mina area, a sacred and remote region of the Tanami Desert, 400 kilometres north west of Alice Springs. She spent her early childhood living a nomadic life near Lake Mackay during the late 1950’s and the early 1960’s. Her mother, Jeanie Lewis Napururrla taught her to collect the plentiful bush tucker and to grind the seeds for damper cooked on hot ashes. Her family used to camp at claypans and soakages. Dorothy remembers her early childhood days in the bush surrounded by her closely-knit extended family as a time of happiness and freedom. This idyllic life with no exposure to the white man came to an end when her family was forcibly relocated to the government settlement at Yuendumu. Dorothy’s father, Paddy Lewis Japanangka greatly regretted the move mainly because of its impact on the traditional education. Dorothy belongs to the Warlpiri language group. During the Dreamtime ancestral women of the Napangardi and Napanangka subsection groups gathered to collect ceremonial digging sticks which had magically emerged from the ground. They performed rituals of song and dance proceeding east to a place known as Jankinyi. Today a large band of trees stands where the digging sticks once were. In 1987 Dorothy was introduced to painting by her friend and artist Eunice Napangardi (deceased). Initially she painted Mukaki, Bush or Wild Plum Dreaming in vibrant colours. She also painted semi-naturalistic and colourful floral patterns relating to the growth cycle of bush bananas. The year 1997 proved to bring about a significant artistic shift, when Dorothy began painting without any traditional iconography from her familial lines, creating her own innovative language to portray her country. Since around that time her art has evolved into a new distinctive and very individual style for which she uses fine dotted lines representing the landscape around Mina Mina, often exploring different and intricate depictions of its salt pans and sand hills. Topographically the sacred site of Mina Mina is made up of two enormous soakage areas that rarely fill with water. They only exist as clay pans. As water soaks into the ground, small areas of earth dry out and lift at the edges, becoming delineated by salt. She depicts the encrustations of salt stretching infinitely onward, etched with the tracks of women as their paths stretch on, crossing and merging, telling their stories. By creating an intricate and fine network of dots and lines Dorothy accomplishes an interplay of tension and expansion. 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. Dorothy’s view is constantly changing, one painting giving an aerial perspective, the next giving the impression as if she had placed a microscope to the ground. Whilst Dorothy does sometimes use colour, it tends to be only in a very subtle manner. As a custodian of her country, she enjoys authority over the land, which she depicts in a strikingly free composition of irregularly spaced crossing lines that make up fascinating grids thus creating what in the Western scheme is considered abstraction. Dorothy’s abstraction, however, cannot be understood outside the context of her intention to paint her land. Her paintings do not raise the question of whether they are either abstract of representational; they rather challenge the idea in which the two are mutually exclusive. Over the years, Dorothy Napangardi’s paintings have become internationally acclaimed and have featured in many exhibitions throughout Australia, the USA and Europe, where they are now keenly sought after by curators and art collectors alike. As testimony to her enormous talent Dorothy is the only double winner of the prestigious annual Telstra Art Award and is collected in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, as well as in numerous collections worldwide. In 2002 she was voted one of top 50 most collectable artists by Australian art collectors. As a guide to her collectability and investment potential, her work has reached a top auction price at Sotheby’s of $ 131,725.-. Copyright 2012-2013 The Aboriginal Art House