Related Works

Painted 2006 at Mount Liebig, Watiyawanu Artists of Amunturrngu Community

Wentja mostly paints Blue Tongue Lizard and Water Dreaming stories, the iconography for which has been handed down to her by her father. She also paints Sandhills, Rockholes, and other landmarks associated with Water and Desert Oaks.

In contrast to her father's work, Wentja's paintings are less geometric with a softening of iconography through interlacing with intricate finely dotted patterning. This soft dotting technique is characteristic of many of the Mount Liebig women artists with whom she paints.

Aboriginal Artists Dictionary of Biographies
is meticulously researched biographical dictionary 446 pages hardcover  book, containing more than 1000 entries and (colour illustrations). The book includes a brief biography and relevant exhibition entries for artists who painted from the beginning of the 1970’s to the first decade of the 21st century. The definitive work on the subject of desert artists.

2008 finalist 25th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award

2005 22nd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award

2004 21st Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award,

2003 20th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, MAGNT

2002 19th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, MAGNT

2001 18th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, MAGNT

COLLECTIONS

Amsterdam The Netherlands Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Tandanya National Aboriginal Art and Cultural Institute Inc. Adelaide Flinders University Museum, Adelaide Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane The Kaplan – Levi Collection, Seattle

Art Bank Sydney

Homes a Court Collection, Perth

Art Gallery of Western Australia

Queensland Art Gallery

Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory

The Kerry Stokes Collection, Australia

National Aboriginal Art and Cultural Institute Tandanya

Flinders University Museum

Thomas Vroom Collection

Tandanya National Aboriginal Art & Cultural Institute

private and corporate collections in Denmark, Poland, England and Germany

Selected Exhibitions

Wentja work has been exhibited in leading Australian and international exhibitions, including the 2003 exhibition Masterpieces from the Western Desert, held in London. Her works are included in major collections, such as the Kerry Stokes and Thomas Vroom Collections and the National Aboriginal Art and Culture Institute in Adelaide.

2000-2003 Chapel on Chapel, Melbourne

2004 Selected in the Alice Prize

2004 Cooee Gallery, Sydney

2005 Cooee gallery, Sydney

2005 Divas of the Desert, Gallery Gondwana

2006 NATSIAA Telstra Awards, Darwin

2005 Watiyawanu Artists, Japingka Gallery,  Fremantle WA

2006 Bond Aboriginal Art, Adelaide SA

2006 Knud Grothe Gallery, Denmark Copenhagen

2006 Towards Black and White, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle WA

2006 Australian Aboriginal Art 2006/2007, John  Gordon Gallery, NSW

2006  This is our Story – 8 selected works, Colliding Worlds Exhibition, Tandanya

2006  Luminaries of the Desert, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle WA

2007  Watiyawanu Artists of Amunturrngu, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle WA

2008  Watiyawanu Artists, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle WA

2014  Dot Code: Desert Artists, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle WA

Wentja's sand hills, rock halls paintings, are landmarks associated with water, desert oaks, 'Blue Tongue Lizard and Water Dreaming' stories which has been hand down to her by her father. Unlike her father geometric work, Wentja 2 work has soft female iconography influence. She has a very strong connection with her culture and a distinctive style, she sings when painting and include songs in her painting which gives a powerful cultural experience and people say that they feel the vibration of her songs and music in her work. She creates softer iconography image in her paintings with interlacing with intricate finely doted patterning. In her paintings, Wentja 2 depicts the colour of the Australian Central Desert country. She is a highly talented and accomplished  artist with a very individual creative flair and a real consistency in her work, and style.

Wentja Morgan Napaltjarri is the artist of the great heritage!

Wentja Morgan Napaltjarri is an artist of enormous integrity and talent, a gifted translator and transmitter of her symbolic and cultural heritage.

Apart from the place of birth, the other crucial factor in her formation as an artist was her parentage. Her father was Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, a Pintupi man who was one of the outstanding founding figures in the Papunya painting movement, while her mother was Napulu Nangala. Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi was born in about 1920 at Walukuritji, south of Kaakurutintjinya (Lake Macdonald), which was also the place where his father died.

After he married Napulu Nangala, he and his family walked to Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff) in about 1948, which was a Lutheran mission established two years earlier as a home to Western Arrernte, Pintupi and Pitjantjatjara people. It was a source of permanent water and of provisions, but it also served as a way of controlling the local nomadic peoples to prevent them from interfering with the spreading cattle industry that was destroying the fragile and ancient environment.

By the time the family moved to Ikuntji, Wentja Morgan Napaltjarri was about three years old and this was her first contact with white people. She had been raised in a traditional manner learning how to gather bush tucker, hunting for small game by following tracks in the bush, and she was exposed to the ritual knowledge of her people.

The family stayed in Ikuntji for about a decade before moving to the newly established settlement at Papunya, roughly 240 km northwest of Alice Springs. This settlement consisted primarily of Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, Arrernte and Anmatyerre peoples. At Papunya, Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi was recognised, within the Pintupi community, as one of the leading senior men, a ngangkari (traditional healer), famous for his hunting, singing and dancing skills, and as a man widely known as an authority on ritual matters.

In 1971 Geoffrey Bardon, who trained in art education at the National Art School in Sydney, took up a posting at the Papunya primary school. Here he facilitated the painting of the Honey Ant Dreaming mural on a school wall as well as the painting of the early painted boards. The former was destroyed, while the latter, of which about a thousand were painted before the introduction of canvases in 1973, became highly prized artworks.

These were amongst the earliest acrylic paintings from the central deserts to be made for ‘permanent’ public viewing, rather than as designs conceived as ephemeral sand paintings or body decorations. The result of considerable negotiations amongst the traditional custodians of the stories (the Tjukurrpa) involved, these paintings may have been the first occasion when much of this imagery—by being shown in public—was revealed to the uninitiated.

This caused considerable excitement in the Aboriginal community and Bardon observed that the mural had a far-reaching impact, for people who believed “in a Dreaming ‘eternity’ caused the artistic ideas developed at Papunya to spread to other Aboriginal communities throughout the Western Desert and Central Desert”. Inexplicably the cultural worth of the mural was not recognised and shortly after Bardon left Papunya the mural was treated as unauthorized graffiti and was destroyed when the school walls were repainted in 1974.

However, during Bardon’s stay in Papunya—between January 1971 and December 1972 - an enthusiasm developed amongst many of the mainly Pintupi and Anmatyerre–Arrernte men for painting their designs on panels with acrylic paint. Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi was one of the last artists to join Bardon’s foundation Papunya painting group.

In November 1972 Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd was incorporated (the word tula may refer to a small hill near Papunya, a Honey Ant Dreaming site) and subsequently it became an important player, firstly in the Australian and then on the international art market. By the late 1970s and the early 1980s, after the establishment of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, late in 1976, many of the people left Papunya for their traditional lands—for example, Pintupi communities were established at Kintore and at Kiwirrkura, where artists continued to live and work. However, the Papunya Tula cooperative thrived, despite many of the contributing artists no longer living there.

The Papunya group achieved a remarkable synthesis of ceremony and topography, realised in a meticulous dot-painting technique and frequently restricted to an earthy palette rich in ochres, reds, black and white. Some of the paintings could be interpreted as involving a reenactment of elaborate ground paintings, using a limited number of symbols or motifs, such as the U-shape, concentric circles, semicircles, lines and dashes, human, animal and bird tracks and journey lines, a symbolic morphology also encountered in body designs, all employed to convey a wide range of meanings.

A concentric circle may stand for a waterhole in one context, while, in another, it can signify a campsite. Elsewhere it may represent part of a plant, a body part, a hill or a nest.

Much depended on the context of the specific narrative. As in Christian iconography, where a particular motif may be read simultaneously on a number of different levels depending on the spiritual enlightenment of the beholder and the liturgical context, similarly in Central and Western Desert painting the same symbol may have different levels of meaning depending on the viewer’s level of initiation.

A U-shape may be read as a topographical form or as a sacred camping site of an ancestral being or as a secret part of a ceremony known only to a fully initiated person. The paintings can be visual parables, of graded decipherability. It is not that sacred imagery is not sometimes depicted in a composition; rather, disclosure is dependent on the initiatory status of the viewer. Then, at a further level of complexity, the shimmering white dots become a symbolic as well as an effective visual device, veiling the levels of meaning.

written by: Professor Sasha Grishin, AM, FAHA

Source & FURTHER REFERENCES:

The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture edited by Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale published by OUP 2000