Deutscher and Hackett

Yunala 2005 was painted in the same year that Yukultji Napangati came to the attention of a wider audience through her inclusion in the Primavera exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Composed of alternating lines created from conjoined white and cream dots on a black and red ochre ground that meander across the canvas, this work creates a three-dimensional land map that articulates her relationship to country and the experience of her upbringing.

Yunala, a rockhole and soakage water site situated among sandhills just to the west of Kiwirrkura in Western Australia, is the site where in mythological times a group of ancestral women camped. While at Yunala the women were digging for the edible roots of the bush banana or silky pear vine Marsdenia Australis, also known as yunala. The lines in the work represent both the sandhills surrounding the site as well as the yunala tubers underground.

Born near Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay) in the Western Desert in 1970, Yukultji Napangati is a Pintupi woman who, while still a young girl, came to national headlines when her family group walked out of the desert into Kiwirrkurra in 1984, prior to which she had been living a traditional life traversing the country close to Wilkinkarra with her eight family members.

Yukultji began painting for Papunya Tula Artists in 1996. In 1999 she contributed to the Kiwirrkura Women’s painting as part of the ‘Western Desert Dialysis Appeal’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in 2005 she was selected as one of nine artists to exhibit at the prestigious Primavera show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. In 2018, she won the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and her work is included in significant public and private collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Hood Museum of Art, USA.

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE