Kitty Simon and the Ladies of Lajamanu | 6-28 March 2020 | Cooee Art Paddington

Kitty Simon and the Ladies of Lajamanu 6 - 28 March 2020 | Cooee Art Paddington Kitty Napanangka Simon | Myra Herbert Nungurrayi | Lily Hargraves Nungurrayi | Lorna Fencer Napurrula PRESENTED BY COOEE ART GALLERY DURING ART MONTH SYDNEY 2020 | 6 - 28 MARCH 2020

“I sing from my heart” - Kitty Napanangka Simon

Kitty Napanangka Simon | Myra Herbert Nungurrayi Lily Hargraves Nungurrayi | Lorna Fencer Napurrula Kitty Simon and the Ladies of Lajamanu 6 - 28 March 2020 Cooee Art Paddington 326 Oxford Street Paddington NSW 2021 In conjunction with Warnayaka Art and Art Month Sydney 2020 Warnayaka Art & Cultural Aboriginal Corporation is funded through the Australian Government’s Indigenous Visual Arts Industry Support Program Cover (Front & Back) Image Kitty Simon Napanangka | Mina Mina Dreaming | 2019 synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen 120 x 60 cm | #18223 Inside Front Cover Image Artist Kitty Simon Napanangka Source: Cooee Art Inside Back Cover Image Kitty Simon Napanangka | Mina Mina Dreaming | 2019 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 120 x 90 cm

Lily Hargraves Nungarrayi | Purrpalala | 2014 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 120 x 60 cm | #18227

Lily Hargraves Nungarrayi | Women’s Dreaming | 2015 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 120 x 60 cm | #18229

The Continuing Gift – Out of the Past and Into the Future.

Warlpiri Women’s Art. Adrian Newstead OAM

Founding Director | Cooee Art Galler y Painting in remote Aboriginal communities is part of a rich communal cultural life.The work of individual artists can never be considered in isolation.

After an intimate association with the women artists of Lajamanu that is now more than 30 years old, we pay tribute to two of Lajamanu’s defining artistic forces and tribal elders, exhibiting their work alongside two of the women carrying and nurturing Warlpiri culture and community into the future. In this exhibition, Kitty Simon and the Ladies of Lajamanu, we will exhibit works

by Kitty Simon Napanangka and Myra Herbert Nungurrayi, alongside a selection of works from the gallery archives by Lilly Hargraves Nungurrayi and Lorna Fencer Napurrula.

Kitty Simon is a dedicated artist with a distinctive, singular aesthetic. Her paintings – at first denounced by senior men for straying too

far from the traditional idiom – have excited discriminating curators and collectors since her first solo exhibition at Cooee Art in 2013, winning admirers both inside and outside her tight-knit Warlpiri community. This was to have been her third solo exhibition with Cooee, which has been her exclusive international agent since the beginning of her career – in partnership with the Warnayaka Art Centre, a haven for the artists in Lajamanu. Earlier this year, Cooee Art received the news that Kitty Napanangka Simon has been unable to complete the body of works required for her solo exhibition due to a health setback (requiring renal dialysis outside of her community) and continual ‘sorry business’.

Lajamanu is about as isolated a township as you will find on the vast Australian continent: ten hours’ drive south of Darwin; eight hours northwest of Alice Springs; and eight hours south-east of Derby. About 1000 Warlpiri people were

moved to this tiny, very isolated point in the north of the Warlpiri estate just after WWII. A number of extraordinary paintings were created here once the old men, deeply steeped in tradition, finally relented and recorded their ancient Warlpiri stories on canvas for the first time in the mid 1980s. Sublime, meditative, zen-like rain Dreamings by Abie Jangala; action paintings by Lorna Fencer, drawn from the epic battle between Yurmupa and Wapertali - the mythological Big and Little Bush Potato men; large ceremonial works full of life, colour and movement by Lilly Hargraves – these are just a taste of the free-wheeling Warlpiri aesthetic that has emerged here over the past 35 years.

In Lajamanu, artistic expression is associated intimately with ceremonial life, celebrating birth, fertility, regeneration, and loss. Of these, loss is ever-present and especially poignant. Here, the ‘sorry camp’ can at times grow almost as big as the township itself. Especially in times when cultural custodians and revered elders pass away. The number of makeshift dwellings at the eastern-most border of the Lajamanu township continually swells and shrinks on the tides of misfortune.

In the sorry camp, people live as they did for time immemorial: as desert nomads sleeping simply under the stars. The long nights are spent keening for those who have died. This is not a time or place to paint. Outside visitors are not welcome where the spirits run free. More than just personal loss, a culture and way of life is being mourned, a nomadic life of which outsiders are largely unaware.

The success of an artist will often be felt throughout the whole community. Conversely, in these times of sorry business community will come together and bolster its struggling parts. In this exhibition, the women painters of Lajamanu, past and present, lift each other up.

So we will wait a year for a solo exhibition by Kitty Napanangka Simon. And, for now, we give expression to the continuing legacy of Warlpiri culture that is easing the path through continual sorry business.

ABOVE | Kitty Simon Napanangka with her family Source: Anna Spencer, Warnayaka Art

Kitty Simon Napanangka | Mina Mina Dreaming | 2020 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 120 x 150 cm | #18225

Kitty Simon Napanangka | Mina Mina Dreaming | 2019 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 120 x 60 cm | #18223

Kitty Simon Napanangka painting Mina Mina Dreaming at Cooee Art Bondi Source: Cooee Art

Kitty Simon Napanangka b. 1948 Langauge - Warlpiri Kitty Napanangka Simon’s paintings appear to be grounded in abstraction, yet it would be hard to conceive of more descriptive visual articulations of ‘country’ in Aboriginal desert art. Through the intersection of colour and free-form shapes and dots scattered in strings across the canvas, Simon describes in detail the desert flowers, salt encrustations and natural features of Mina Mina, the home of her sacred Dreaming in the southwestern region of the Tanami Desert.

Kitty Simon painted her first works in the late 1980s before hanging up her paint brushes to focus on raising a family. She took up painting once more in 2008, by which time she had four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Experimenting with various styles, she eventually adopted a loose, immediate approach to painting and embraced a distinctly individual style. The works representing yawulyu (women’s ritual designs) employ optic whites and an array of pastels in large sweeps of

tone-on-tone painting to capture the feeling and colour of desert flowers and the natural features of the surrounding salt plains at Mina Mina, 600 kilometres to the south of Lajamanu.

She paints rapidly and without draft, the composition built anew on each new canvas. The act of painting is metaphysical. Her brush moves accompanied by rhythmic chanting. The ancient song recalls and brings to life the songline and story that she is depicting from the epic Mina Mina narrative.The very act of painting is a means by which she can revise and vivify knowledge of Country and the creation story of Mina Mina.

While Simon’s process is rapid and instinctive, each work is carefully considered and deliberated over, altered and discussed with the other artists of Lajamanu. This sometimes provokes laughter and sometimes debate as each artist gives their thoughts and reaction to the work.

Kitty Simon Napanangka | Mina Mina Dreaming | 2019 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 149 x 119 cm | #18310

Kitty Simon Napanangka | Mina Mina Dreaming | 2020 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 120 x 90 cm | #18224

Myra Herbert Nungarrayi with Budgerigar Dreaming 2019 Source: Anna Spencer | Warnayaka Art

Myra Herbert Nungarrayi (formerly Patrick) b. 1946 Langauge - Warlpiri Born in Willowra in the southern reaches of the Tanami Desert in 1946, Myra Patrick Herbert began painting in 1986. For more than two decades, her paintings were a departure from other Lajamanu artists. In a community renowned for gestural works featuring bold linear brushwork, Myra’s approach was more meditative and painstaking. She employed sharpened twigs in a fine dotting technique, imparting a shimmering peaceful effect in paintings that might take up to a year to complete. During this period, she occasionally collaborated on the paintings of her husband, Freddy Patrick Tjangala (now deceased). At the time she gained notoriety for her intricate designs which were transferred onto pottery and glass. Yet this extremely painstaking painting process eventually resulted in her developing a repetitive strain injury and she stopped painting for some time.

Once Myra returned to painting, she abandoned this laborious style and took up the brush, adopting a far more gestural and colourful style.

Her works featured the footprints of the birds and animals she is associated with as custodian of her Dreamings. These include Jurlpa - the Small Owlet, Marlu - the Kangaroo. Other important Dreamings depicted in her works include Witi (Ceremonial Pole), Bush Vine, Snake, and Cockatoo. Following the death of her husband, she changed her name from Patrick to her father’s family name, Herbert. Myra’s father was born in Yinipaka (Lake Surprise NT), where her Dreamings originate.

In 2018 Myra was selected to participate in Parrtjima, the indigenous light festival in Alice Springs. Her paintings were translated into visual light projections and a collaborative installation incorporating sounds and images of the budgerigar, another of her important Dreamings.

Myra Herbert Nungarrayi | Budgerigar Dreaming | 2019 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 120 x 60 cm | #18221

Myra Herbert Nungarrayi | Yinapaka Dreaming | 2018 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 84 x 49 cm | #17362

Myra Herbert Nungarrayi | Yinapaka Dreaming | 2018 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 84 x 48 cm | #17363

Lily Hargraves Nungarrayi Source: Warnajaka Art

Lily Hargraves Nungarrayi b. 1930 | d. 2018 Langauge - Warlpiri Lily Hargraves was born in the Tanami Desert near Chilla Well in the early 1930s. She moved to the settlement of Lajamanu, located at Hooker Creek In the 1950s, when the Warlpiri population at Yuendemu had outgrown that settlement’s ability to house all its occupants. She continued to live in Lajamanu until her death in 2018.

She began painting on canvas in 1986, after a traditional painting course was held in the community. She quickly developed into a central figure in the painting movement that evolved at Lajamanu. Deeply involved in women’s ceremonial practice and traditional law, Lily divided her time between hunting bush food with family members on country around Lajamanu and working at the Warnayaka Art Centre. She painted with a restricted palette during the 1980s, depicting detailed ceremonial activities. However, as time progressed her works became more highly colour-charged and gestural. In time, Lily’s outgoing personality and seniority amongst the Warlpiri women saw her become a mainstay of the art

centre as she and other senior women chanted their songlines while painting their Dreaming stories. In her 80s, during the final decade of her life, she was driven in her fervour to record and preserve her culture. Her love of colour and freedom of expression resulted in a number of singular and distinctive works executed with heavy, bold, confident brush work and a broad range of colour on minimal painterly grounds.

Her depth of character and life experience was clearly evident and reflected in her work. Toward the end of her life, she had become an esteemed senior Law women, responsible for supervising women’s song and dance ceremonies. Lily’s status as one of the old desert walkers, born before her tribespeople adopted a sedentary life, saw her remarkable works - predominantly depicting aspects of Ngalyipi (Medicine/snake Vine) Mala (Wallaby) and Karnta (Women’s Dreaming), - included in important private and museum collections throughout Australia, the Americas and Europe.

Lily Hargraves Nungarryi | Bush Turkey Dreaming | 2013 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 120 x 150 cm | #13914

Lily Hargraves Nungarryi | Duck Pond Dreaming | 2014 synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen | 119 x 149 cm | #18311

Lorna Fencer Naparrula Source: Cooee Art

Lorna Fencer Naparrula b. 1924 - 2006 Langauge - Warlpiri Lorna was the custodian of the sacred country of Yumurrpa and for the Yarla (bush potato), Luju (caterpillar), Bush Tomato, Onion and Plum Dreamings – many different seeds and, importantly, spring water for the Napurrurla-Jupurrurla and Jakamarra-Nakamarra skin groups. She also had ancestral rights over the Water Snake, which become numerous when the country is in flood and the riverbeds and claypans fill with water.

She painted these as sinuous lines upon a watery expanse of liquid colour. Her paintings reflected the traditional stories of Ancestral women journeying through the bush, singing and dancing as they collected food. Sometimes her female ancestors would come upon a caterpillar, ‘that cheeky one’ that bites them while they are picking fruit, making them itchy. In other works, Lorna would paint the digging sticks they used to find the bush potato or yam that spread underground in a meandering complex of roots and bulbs, a primary source of food in their arid homeland.

Lorna Napurrula Fencer’s vivid and brightly coloured paintings injected new energy into the living tradition of desert art. Her sheer joy and vitality when painting was a constant re-affirmation of the restorative spiritual power of traditional desert life. Lorna’s late career works, created in her 80’s, are a revelation. The combination of her unrivalled knowledge of tribal lore and Dreamings, along with her intuitive use of colour and free, gestural brush strokes, prompts comparisons with the late Emily Kngwarreye. Yet Lorna’s work was decidedly and uniquely her own. At her best she mastered colour, carefully considering its impact before laying it down on the canvas. Her large epic canvases created in the eighth decade of her life were final and compelling statements about the power of the great Warlpiri stories that she painted for over twenty years.

Lorna Fencer Naparrula | Bush Potato (Yarla) synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 128 x 178 cm | #11491

Lorna Fencer Naparrula | Caterpillar synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen | 280 x 198 cm | #17934

Lorna Fencer Naparrula | Boomerang | 1999 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 127 x 100 cm | #9855

Kitty Simon Napanangka | Mina Mina Dreaming | 2019 synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 120 x 90 cm

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