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