Dorothy Napangardi was a Walpiri woman from Mina Mina, a highly significant sacred site in one of the most remote areas of Australia; the Tanami Desert, north west of Alice Springs, Northern Territory. Her finely painted minimal depiction of 'Women's Dreaming on the Mina Mina' have deservedly won her critical and popular acclaim.
Regarded as one of the leading artists of the contemporary Aboriginal Art movement, she painted her father's homeland at Lake McKay. Creating her own unique language to describe these homelands, Dorothy's paintings are shaped by an interlacing network of dotted lines. These lines form both a micro and a macro study of the land; creating the homeland topography while telling a story of the ancestral tracks. These lines represent the salt encrustations around the dry clay pans etched with the tracks of the women.
Belonging to women is the literal translation of the title Karntakurlangu (Karnta means 'women', kurlangu means 'belonging').
During the Jukurrpa (Dreaming), ancestral women of the Napangardi and Napanangka sub-section groups (aunt / niece relationship, in which knowledge is passed from one to the other) gathered to collect ceremonial digging sticks that had emerged from the ground from the desert oak trees (Allocasuarina decaisneana) which continue to grow today. They then proceeded east, performing rituals of song and dance, to the place known as Jankinyi.
In this artwork the artist has created a portion of the Jukurrpa (Dreaming) that depicts the ancestral women dancing across the country terrain of Mina Mina, around the soakages of Mina Mina and the crustations that form when rainwater recedes; through the spinifex clumps and over the sand hills.
