Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  Painted in Alice Springs, Northern Territory
  Purchased from Gallery Gondwana, Alice Springs in September 2006
  The Laverty Collection, Sydney
  
  EXHIBITED:
  Gallery Gondwana at Melbourne Art Fair, 2 - 6 August 2000
  Laverty 2, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, 14 May - 14 August 2011
  All our relations at Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 June - 16 September 2012
  
  LITERATURE:
  Australian Commercial Galleries Association and Melbourne Art Fair Foundation, Melbourne Art Fair 2000, exh. cat., St Kilda South, Victoria: Australian Commercial Galleries Association, 2000, p.61 (illus.)
  Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia's Remote Aboriginal Communities - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2008, p.85 (illus.)
  Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Australian Aboriginal Art - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Edition II, Melbourne: Kleimeyer Industries, 2011, p.91 (illus.)
  Jean Fisher, 'Thinking, Weaving: Another Approach to Cosmopolitanism' in Biennale of Sydney 2012: all our relations, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2012, p.85 (illus.)
  
  DOROTHY ROBINSON NAPANGARDI
  Dorothy Napangardi Robinson was born at Mina Mina
  and moved to the Warlpiri community of Yuendumu
  about 1957, around the time she saw a white person for
  the first time. Her public painting career commenced in
  Alice Springs thirty years later. The first phase is marked
  by paintings of intense colour depicting bush plants,
  mainly yuparli (bush banana), in compositions that
  radiate from the centre of the canvas. In 1997-8 these
  images dissolved into a vortex consisting of sequences of
  short lines of dots that produce a pulsating visual effect.
  
  By 1999 Napangardi's subject matter turned to the
  saltpans and sand hills of Mina Mina and its associations
  with the all-encompassing Women's Digging Stick
  Dreaming. With this subject in mind, the perspective
  in Napangardi's changed dramatically to a planar
  matrix of white dots on a black ground that capture an
  abstracted sense of the terrain and movement across it.
  In discussing Salt on Mina Mina, 2001, that won the 18th
  Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award
  in the year it was painted, Bernice Murphy describes
  Napangardi's process thus: 'the topographical plain of
  country is lifted and transformed conceptually into the
  optical plane of the painting' (Telstra National Aboriginal
  and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, 2001, catalogue, p.16).
  
  In the following year, Napangardi's stature as a
  major artist was underlined when the Museum of
  Contemporary Art, Sydney, mounted a retrospective
  exhibition of her work. Subsequent to this, Napangardi
  developed another visual response to the site of Mina
  Mina with paintings of lines of black dots on white
  grounds that convey a sense of endless open space and
  shifting sands, as in Sandhills, 2006.
  
  Wally Caruana

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Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art

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