Julie Nangala Robertson – Mina Mina – in association with Warlukurlangu Artists

Warlpiri artist Julie Nangala Robertson belongs to a distinguished lineage of Warlpiri artists. Her paternal grandfather Shorty Jangala Robertson was renowned for his Water Dreamings and her maternal grandfather Paddy Japanangka Lewis was a custodian of the sacred site of Mina Mina, located about 600 kilometres west of Yuendumu. Moreover, Nangala is the eldest daughter of 2001 Telstra-winning artist Dorothy Napangardi, a foremost painter of her father’s Mina Mina story. Nangala is heir to both her grandfathers’ and her mother’s practices and the revolutionary painting movement of Warlpiri women initiated at Yuendumu in the early 1980s.

There and then, inspired by the pioneering fieldwork of anthropologist Nancy Munn at Yuedumu,¹ anthropologist Françoise Dussart researched women’s designs for their yawulyu ceremonies and established that each Warlpiri woman has a strong practical understanding of jukurrpa (Dreaming law) and identifies intimately with her own conception site and jukurrpa. In a breakthrough moment for Aboriginal women across the desert who had long been denied the opportunity to paint on canvas, Dussart encouraged about thirty senior Warlpiri women to transfer their ritual designs onto coolamons or canvas boards and sell them in the community. This painting activity served as a catalyst for the women many of whom in 1986, joined the Warlukurlangu Artists Association at Yuendumu, where over fifty per cent of practising artists are still women.

Another significant factor in the evolution of a women’s painting across the desert occurred at Yuendumu where Warlpiri men ‘gave’ to women the right to use dots in their acrylic paintings.² Large dots, used as a ground in men’s ceremonial shields and to heighten graphic symbols are not traditionally part of women’s body design for yawalyu, which consists of stripes and curved lines. The women, authorised to use dots as an embellishment of kuruwarri (signs of ancestral beings in country), established them as an integral part of the iconography of acrylic paintings made for sale in contrast to ochre body paintings. From the outset, Warlpiri artists often favoured bright primary colours, which differed from the more subdued red-yellow-black-and-white palette commonly used by Papunya Tula artists.

Two of the founding female members of Warlukurlangu Artists, sisters, Judy Napangardi Watson and Maggie Napangardi Watson, who lived and worked at Yuendumu, commonly painted the Karnta-kurlangu Jukurrpa (Digging Stick Dreaming) connected in significant ways to their country of Mina Mina. In their compositions of this principal subject, both the sisters worked with a medley of brilliant hues and with bold gestural brushstrokes. As Dr Christine Nicholls has explained, during the Jukurrpa digging sticks magically rose up from beneath the ground at Mina Mina, symbolised by the proliferation of desert oaks in this country, thereby equipping a host of ancestral women for their travels over a vast stretch of country.³ Significantly, therefore in the context of this karnta (women’s) kurlangu (digging stick) Dreaming, ‘digging sticks are strongly emblematic of women, to the point of being synonymous with the idea of femininity’.⁴

Dorothy Napangardi, two generations younger than the Napangardi sisters and based in Alice Springs, also focused on this major women’s Jukurrpa intrinsic to her birthplace of Mina Mina, inherited from her father. Initially, Dorothy Napangardi painted with vibrant colours and loose brushstrokes but eventually diverged from the Warlukurlangu model and opted for a far more minimal palette and visual language. Eschewing colour and customary Warlpiri iconography, she adopted a hard-edge geometric style, employing a monochrome palette and working only in variations of tiny white or black dots, spaced rather than tightly clustered against backgrounds of the opposite tonality.This cerebral style of fine dots that form modulations of broken or continuous lines gave Napangardi’s work an austere gravitas very different from that of other Warlpiri women working at that time.

In 2023, I encountered Julie Nangala Robertson’s work in the NATSIAA and

was mesmerised by the delicacy of the organic veils of red and blue dots that were overlaid with bolder red and blue swathes of dots that wandered horizontally across the cream surface of her prize-winning painting. I noticed her association with Warlukurlangu Artists and drew parallels with the work of her late mother from whom she traced her authority to represent the Mina Mina Jukurrpa, which only became the focus of her own practice when Napangardi passed away in 2013, as Nangala has stated: ‘I used to paint my own site [Pirlinyanu, a Water Dreaming place of rocky outcrops and deep water springs] however, after my mother’s death, I have painted and focused on Mina Mina, to continue to honour my mother’s country and her narratives’. ⁴

Thus, for Nangala, painting is a way of memorialising her mother’s legacy, as she has explained:

I learnt to be an artist by watching my mother Dorothy Napangardi paint. I grew up sitting next to her, watching how she built up the dots and made her paintings. She painted in her own way and it was different to any other paintings I had seen. She saw country in her own way. She would look at the hills, the expanse of sandhills or the pattern of perentie skin. She would then recreate that texture and colours on her canvas. Her dots are the tracks of the woman walking and dancing at Mina Mina… When I paint, I think of my mother and the stories she told me. I remember her voice and the joy with which she spoke about Mina Mina and being on country, hunting and dancing. When I am painting, I think of my mother. In the quiet moments, I reflect on the ways our lives are similar. It makes me happy and proud to be recreating the steps of the women at Mina Mina and honouring my mother. I am following in her footprints, recreating her story and memory. ⁵

Looking closely at Nangala’s Mina Mina paintings for this exhibition, it is possible to sense echoes of Napangardi’s compositional structures particularly in paintings composed of veils of white dotes of different intensity floating on black surfaces. In work no. 2642/24, a loose rectangle comprised of vertical lines of tiny dots overlays a squarish shape formed of parallel horizontal striations of white dots. Whereas in no. 2259/24, the central rectangle formed of vertical lines of dots that is edged by horizontal lines of dots, is cut through by curved, angled or straight lines of bold white dots. These are paintings of solemnity and compelling restraint, in which the weft elements infuse energy, movement and rhythm into the warp. In other works with cream backgrounds that issue from her prize-winning 2023 work, Nangala’s lyricism comes to the fore. The living lines suggestive of the tracks of the Digging stick women embedded in a sacred topography, which is evoked by veils of gentle dots, signals the advent of an distinctive artist’s hand. Nangala’s fondness for using organic chords of primary red and blue that flow like ribbons across her compositions and the sensibility of her delicate mark making give her work a visual music all her own. Moreover, through her subtle colour harmonies, Nangala distances herself from both her mother’s graphic monochome geometries and the rainbow palette of many of her Warlukurlangu peers.

 

Judith Ryan AM

 

¹ Munn established that women have their own designs which differ in mythological content and visual thrust from those of men, and manage their own affairs and ceremonies, sanctioned by their ancestors, see Nancy D. Munn, Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1973.

² See Françoise Dussart, ‘Women’s Acrylic Paintings from Yuendumu’ in M. West (ed.), The Inspired Dream, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1988, pp. 35–41.

³ See Christine Nicholls, ‘The Three Napangardi’s, ‘To the Memory of Maggie Napangardi Watson’ in Judith Ryan (ed.) Colour Power: Aboriginal Art Post 1984 in the Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, 2004, p. 123.

⁴ ibid, p. 125.

⁵ Artist’s statement, for 2023 exhibition at Suzanne O’Connell Gallery, Painting for our Mother, Walking in her Footprints,

<https://suzanneoconnellgallery.com/yuendumu_sabrina_julie_robertson_2023/>, accessed 17 July 2024.