Karntakurlangu - Dorothy Robinson Napangardi

Dorothy Napangardi was a Warlpiri woman from Mina Mina, a sacred site in the remote Tanami Desert, northwest of Alice Springs. Her refined, minimalistic compositions – often portraying Karntakurlangu, or Women’s Dreaming – brought her critical and popular acclaim, and established her as one of the foremost figures in contemporary Aboriginal art.

This painting refers to her father's Country at Lake Mackay. Interlaced networks of fine dotted lines create a topographical and ancestral map of the terrain, representing both the salt-encrusted clay pans of the desert and the ceremonial journeys undertaken by Napangardi and Napanangka women during the Jukurrpa (Dreaming). These women – aunt and niece – gathered digging sticks that had emerged from the desert oak trees, performing rituals of song and dance as they moved across Country to the site of Jankinyi.

Napangardi’s rhythmic, meditative surfaces evoke a deep spiritual connection to place, rendering the vastness of the desert through an intricate geometry of ancestral memory and ceremonial movement.

© DOROTHY ROBINSON NAPANGARDI / Copyright Agency, 2025