Acrylic on canvas
120 x 80 cm
Nancy has painted some of her traditional country located a little south of
Balgo in the Great Sandy Desert. This country is known as Lumbanbardee. Lumbanbardee
contains a series of ‘inta’ or ‘living water ’ places.
These ‘inta’ contain reliable drinking water, found in large rockholes,
in country that is otherwise dominated by tali, or sand dunes. The repeated
lines of the painting are tali (sandhills). The brightly coloured sections
represent an abundance of bushtucker including karnti (bush potato).
PROVENANCE
Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills, Western Australia, painted 2003,
Catalogue number 146/03
Nancy is a Kukatja woman whose country lies to the south and east of Balgo,
between Nyirripi, Kintore and Lappi Lappi. Nancy grew up on these lands and
in her early twenties
a white man brought her family to Mount Doreen Station near Yuendumu and they
settled there for a while.
Nancy worked sorting rocks at the mine that is now closed down. Nancy ’s
father and younger sister went travelling from there and got into some intertribal
conflict. Three people died shortly after, including her father, and it is
said that he was ‘sung’.
Nancy married a Walpiri man from the Tanami area and lived in Yuendumu, then
at the Granites where he worked in the mine while Nancy brought up their first
two children, a daughter and a son. The family gradually moved northwest from
the Tanami to Gordon Downs where they had another son. Nancy has outlived her
husband and is settled at Balgo with other Warlpiri people.
Together with her sisters, Nancy is an important Law Woman with responsibility
to maintain the song cycles of her country. An influential person, she was
involved in the production of traditional artifacts in the 1970s and early
1980s and became a key figure in the early Balgo women’s painting movement.
Nancy ’s works have been exhibited
widely in Australia and overseas.
REPRESENTED
National Gallery of Victoria
Araluen Collection, Alice Springs
The Holmes à Court Collection
Kluge Ruhe Collection, USA
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