Artist: Nancy Ross Nungurrayi

Size: 1010mm x 1110mm

Medium: Acrylic on Linen

Area: Central Desert

Language: Pintupi

Nancy Ross Nungurrayi was born in the Pollock Hills area in about 1935. She lived in the Wala Wala area as a small child and after she married. When her first husband passed away, she walked to Mt. Liebig carrying her first child, Marlene Nampitjinpa. She now lives at Kintore and has only in later years painted on canvas. Prior to this her paintings were done in the sand ‘telling stories’. Nancy mostly paints designs associated with the travels of a group of women and their ceremonies at the soakage water sites of various regions within and around her land. Her technique involving the use of a dark ground overlaid by a field of thick confectionate paler dots in which the design or “kuruwarri” emerges from the ground as if it were etched into the field dots, while the reverse is actually the case, the dots create the design in relief in the negative space of the ground. During the early years of the painting movement (70’s and early 80’s) painting in a fine art context was an almost exclusively male prerogative. Women began painting in the late 1980’s throughout the desert but many Pintipi women did not begin painting in earnest until the mid 90’s. Nancy, as well as her other Papunya female artists exhibited at the Flinders University in Adelaide early in the year 2001 and collections include the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney