Yalti Napangati - Australian indigenous artist = great dot paintings

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https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au

https://designstore.artgallery.wa.gov.au

https://artsdaustralie.com/en/artists/yalti-napangati

 

Biography

Yalti Napangati was born in 1970 into the artistic community of Papunya. She lives mostly in Kiwirrkura and belongs to the Pintupi group, who were driven from their ancestral lands during colonisation. The Pintupi were grouped together in the settlement centres of the central desert, which is why they lived for a long time in the Papunya region, where contemporary Aboriginal painting was born in the 1970s. The artist borrows this iconographic vocabulary from the ritual floor paintings that she and other initiates created to commemorate the passage of her Ancestors to this sacred site and to celebrate Mother Earth. Like most painters in the Western Desert, Yalti Napangati uses dot painting. These works testify to the attachment of Aboriginal painters to their land, referring to a sacred site created in the Dreamtime by ancestral women who roamed the desert. At each of their stops, they established various rituals that the Aborigines have continued to celebrate ever since.The site in question is located in the south-west of the community of Kiwwikura (Western Australia). This is where, during the Dreamtime, a group of women stopped along the way to camp and pick edible berries known as kampurarrpa or desert grapes from the Solanum centrale, a small shrub. These berries can be eaten directly from the shrub, but are sometimes ground into a paste and cooked in charcoal to form a kind of stew. The women would then have continued their journey eastwards via the nearby site of Wirrulnga, before heading north-east to Wilkinkarra (Lake Makkay).

Following the tradition of desert painting, Yalti Napangati gives the appearance of a satellite vision of her territory, offering a highly abstract cartography combining different levels of reading. The different motifs represent the geographical features of the landscape, as well as the fruit-laden bushes and bush fodder that the women would have collected on their travels. The 'U' shapes symbolise the ancestors, accompanied by their coolamons (oval shapes) and digging sticks (vertical bars). The coolamon is a container used for many purposes: harvesting seeds and berries in the desert or carrying water. Generally speaking, they were therefore linked to traditionally feminine activities, such as looking after children and finding means of subsistence. and harvesting roots. The dotted lines that link them together symbolise the path taken, while the serpentine lines represent the tracks left by the snake as seen from the sky. The artist refers to the iconographic vocabulary of the ritual floor paintings that she and other initiates created to commemorate the passage of her ancestors to this sacred site and to celebrate Mother Earth.

 

 

Yukultji and Yalti with their family, 2019

Ben Mcnamara

National Photographic Portrait Prize 2020 Finalist

 

Yukultji and Yalti with their family, 2019

 

Yukultji and Yalti are members of a group referred to as ‘the Pintupi Nine’, believed to be the last Indigenous Australians to come into contact with the ‘outside’ world following European settlement. The group was still pursuing a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle, consistent with that lived by their ancestors for tens of thousands of years, when they came to media attention in October 1984. This photograph was taken in Pintupi country on Lake Mackay, a salt lake 100 kilometres long in the middle of the desert on the Western Australia-Northern Territory border.

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalti_Napangati

 

Yalti Napangati (born c.1970) is an Australian Pintupi artist. She is a painter of the Western Desert style of art, and paints with the Papunya Tula artist cooperative.[4] She is one of the Pintupi Nine, the last group of Aboriginal Australians living a traditional way of life in Australia. Her ex-husband, Warlimpirrnga, is also a well-known artist and member of the Pintupi Nine.[5][6]

 

Life

Yalti was born in the Great Sandy Desert, sometime around 1970. She and her family, the Pintupi Nine, lived as nomads in the desert, travelling along the western side of Lake Mackay.[5] Most other Pintupi families had moved into settlements during the 1950s, but Yalti's father kept the family away from these. Her parents were Lanti (or "Joshua") and Nanu.[4] She has an older brother, Tamayinya, and a younger sister, Yukultji. She married Warlimpirrnga sometime during the early 1980s, possibly when she was as young as 12.[1]

She and her family came out of the desert in 1984. She now lives at Kiwirrkurra, and has two sons and two daughters.[4]

 

Artistic career

Yalti finished her first paintings as part of the Papunya Tula artist cooperative in June 1996. She makes acrylic paintings of landscapes associated with Pintupi dreaming stories. Her paintings are of important places in her country, around Marruwa, Laurryi, Wirrulnga and Patjarr.[4]

 

References

  1.  Toohey, Paul (4 May 2004). "The Last Nomads" (PDF). The Bulletin. Nine Entertainment Co. pp. 28–35. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 11 February 2016.
  2.  For example, see: "The Last Nomads". Aboriginal Art Store. Archived from the original on 6 July 2011. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
  3.  Her name is sometimes spelled Yardi, which is closer to how it sounds. Napangati is her skin name by birth, but she is sometimes written with the skin name Napaltjarri, which her "sisters" (cousins) Topsy and Takariya belong to.[2]
  4.  Johnson, Vivien (2008). Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists. Alice Springs: IAD Press. p. 334.
  5.  "Yalti Napangati". Honey Ant Gallery. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
  6.  Adlam, Nigel (3 February 2007). "Lost tribe happy in modern world". Herald Sun. Herald & Weekly Times Pty Ltd.

 

 

 

Febbraio 16, 2026