The paintings of Naata Nungurrayi are grounded in journeys across Country.
Rockholes, sandhills, women’s sites, gathering places, and ceremonial movement appear through dense fields of dots, circles, bands, and sweeping linear forms. Some paintings are quiet and restrained. Others are highly layered, with colour accumulating until the surface seems to move.
A senior Pintupi woman, Nungurrayi spent part of her early life travelling through the Western Desert before later living at Papunya, Walungurru (Kintore), and Kiwirrkurra.
When she began painting publicly in the 1990s, the places and stories that entered her work were not distant subjects.
They belonged to Country she had known directly.
Who was Naata Nungurrayi?
Naata Nungurrayi was born c.1932 at Kumilnga, west of the Pollock Hills in the Western Desert.
Art Leven records her language as Pintupi and her community associations with Kiwirrkurra and Kintore. She later became closely associated with Papunya Tula Artists.
She lived a traditional desert life with her family until the early 1960s, when they encountered a government welfare patrol and were subsequently moved to Papunya.
The displacement was profound, but her knowledge of Country remained.
That knowledge later became central to her paintings.
Remembering Country
Naata Nungurrayi’s paintings are closely connected with the places through which she travelled as a young woman.
In an account published by the National Gallery, she described painting her home and the Country through which women travelled, including Marrapinti and other significant places west of Kintore. She recalled travelling through this landscape herself with family, drinking from rockholes and moving between sites.
This personal experience is important.
The paintings are not based on an imagined desert.
They emerge from lived geography.
Nungurrayi knew the routes.
She knew the water places.
She knew the sandhills.
And she held cultural knowledge connected with the women’s Tjukurrpa associated with them.
Marrapinti
Marrapinti is one of the subjects most closely associated with Naata Nungurrayi.
The site lies west of the Pollock Hills and is connected with a group of ancestral women travelling through Pintupi Country.
The National Gallery of Victoria records that the women came from further west, camped at Marrapinti, performed ceremonies, and later continued eastwards through other significant sites.
Nungurrayi returned to Marrapinti repeatedly throughout her career.
The NGV holds several works on the subject, including Women’s Dreaming at Marrapinti from 1999, 2000, and 2002, as well as paintings relating to the designs and senior women associated with the rockhole.
This repetition reflects the importance of the place.
Marrapinti was not one image to be painted once.
It could be approached through different aspects of story, ceremony, movement, and Country.
Women travelling through Country
Movement is central to Naata Nungurrayi’s work.
Many paintings concern ancestral women travelling across the desert, visiting sites, gathering food, and carrying ceremonial knowledge.
Art Leven describes her paintings as frequently referring to women’s sites and journeys, with circular motifs, scalloped forms, and linear structures arranged across broad pictorial fields.
The paintings do not present these journeys as linear illustrations.
Instead, the entire surface becomes a network.
One site connects with another.
Bands can suggest sandhills or movement.
Circular forms mark places.
Clusters gather around important areas.
The viewer moves visually through Country rather than towards one fixed destination.
Rockholes and water
Waterholes and rockholes are recurring elements within Naata Nungurrayi’s paintings.
In the Western Desert, such places are essential to movement and survival.
They are also culturally significant.
Marrapinti itself is a rockhole site, and other places represented by Nungurrayi are similarly connected with water and women’s journeys.
In her own account, she recalled moving through Country by drinking from rockholes along the route.
This gives the repeated circular and clustered forms in her paintings a wider context.
Water is geographic.
Practical.
Ancestral.
And part of lived memory.
Sandhills
The tali, or sandhills, surrounding Marrapinti also appear within Nungurrayi’s visual language.
The NGV identifies lines within Women’s Dreaming at Marrapinti as representing the sandhills surrounding the site.
These forms help structure the paintings.
Long bands can move vertically or diagonally across the canvas.
They establish direction.
They divide fields of colour.
They create a sense of travelling through Country.
The sandhills are therefore not background scenery.
They help organise the work itself.
Women’s ceremony
Naata Nungurrayi held cultural authority to paint women’s sites, journeys, and ceremonial subjects.
Art Leven connects her work particularly with Women’s Law and with the ancestral Tingari women who travelled across desert Country.
Ceremonial body designs also inform the structure of her paintings.
Marks once associated with the body can move onto canvas.
A repeated design becomes a larger field.
Linear elements expand.
Circular motifs become sites.
The canvas creates a new scale for cultural forms that existed before Nungurrayi began painting publicly.
The visual language of Naata Nungurrayi
Naata Nungurrayi’s mature paintings are highly distinctive.
Some works contain gridded or linear structures beneath dense layers of dots.
Others use broad scalloped forms and circular motifs.
Her surfaces can be thick and physical, with paint built up repeatedly.
The NGV describes her approach as involving continual mixing and dabbing of colour over an underlying gridded composition, producing richly textured surfaces.
This is one of the strengths of her work.
Structure exists underneath apparent freedom.
The paintings feel spontaneous, but they are held together by a strong internal organisation.
Colour in Naata Nungurrayi’s paintings
Art Leven describes Nungurrayi as often favouring soft ochre palettes, though she could also work with more vivid combinations.
Red.
Orange.
Pink.
White.
Black.
Muted brown.
Occasional blue or purple.
Different colours overlap rather than remaining in clearly separated blocks.
The NGV notes that she frequently mixed many colours while working, creating dappled surfaces with considerable tonal variation.
This gives her paintings a particular richness.
Colour seems to emerge gradually rather than being imposed in flat areas.
Texture and physical presence
Nungurrayi often applied paint thickly.
Dots can rise from the surface.
Bands accumulate over one another.
Edges remain visible.
This gives the work a physical quality that is particularly apparent at close range.
Art Leven connects this heavy application of paint with the expressive approach developed by women artists from the region during the 1990s.
From a distance, the painting may appear unified.
Close up, it becomes a landscape of individual marks.
Papunya Tula and women’s painting
Naata Nungurrayi began painting with Papunya Tula Artists in 1996.
Art Leven records that she was encouraged to paint by Marina Strocchi, then working at Haasts Bluff, and that her work appeared in Papunya Tula group exhibitions from 1997 onwards.
Her emergence belongs to an important period in the history of Western Desert painting.
Papunya Tula had originally become internationally known through male painters from the early 1970s.
By the 1990s, senior Pintupi women were developing increasingly prominent painting practices of their own.
Nungurrayi became one of the most significant among them.
Combining structure and gesture
One of the qualities that distinguishes Naata Nungurrayi’s work is the balance between careful organisation and expressive mark-making.
Art Leven describes her paintings as combining elements of the structured geometric language associated with earlier Pintupi painting with the more painterly approaches developed by women during the 1990s.
That combination is visible throughout her work.
A grid can sit underneath loose dotting.
Circular sites can coexist with broad sweeps of paint.
A highly structured story can produce an apparently free surface.
The tension between these two qualities gives the work much of its energy.
Marrapinti as lived and ancestral Country
Marrapinti is particularly important because it connects Nungurrayi’s own lived experience with ancestral narrative.
She knew the place personally.
She had travelled through it.
She also held knowledge of the ancestral women connected with the site.
The National Gallery records Nungurrayi recalling both her own journey through Marrapinti and the women’s Tjukurrpa associated with ceremony there.
This means biography and ancestral story cannot be neatly separated within the paintings.
The same Country carries both.
Women’s Dreaming at Marrapinti
The repeated title Women’s Dreaming at Marrapinti appears across major examples of Nungurrayi’s work.
The NGV holds multiple paintings under this title, including significant works executed at Kintore around the turn of the century.
These works demonstrate how one subject could generate considerable visual diversity.
Some are dense and heavily layered.
Others give more prominence to broad linear forms.
Colour varies.
Scale changes.
The same cultural foundation supports continuous experimentation.
Pintupi Country and place names
Nungurrayi’s work extends beyond Marrapinti.
The NGV collection includes works connected with Yumari, Unkunya, Ngaminya, Tjulturunga, and Pukarratjana, among other places.
These titles are important.
They locate the paintings within a particular geography.
Rather than describing the work only as desert abstraction, the place names remind us that the imagery arises from Country with its own cultural and spatial relationships.
Each painting belongs somewhere.
Recognition of Naata Nungurrayi
Naata Nungurrayi became one of the most recognised senior women painters associated with Papunya Tula.
Her work appeared in Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2000, along with numerous Desert Mob exhibitions and Papunya Tula presentations nationally and internationally.
She was also repeatedly selected as a finalist in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards and received a Highly Commended award in 2002.
Her paintings are held in collections including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Harvard Art Museums, and Kluge-Ruhe.
The NGV alone records 13 works by the artist in its collection.
Looking at a Naata Nungurrayi painting
A Naata Nungurrayi painting often becomes more complex the longer it is viewed.
At first, the surface may appear as a broad field of colour.
Then circles emerge.
Lines become sandhills.
Clusters form around sites.
Individual dots begin to separate.
A grid appears beneath the surface.
The painting moves between the very small and the very large.
A single mark.
A rockhole.
A journey.
A wide area of Country.
These scales coexist.
The legacy of Naata Nungurrayi
Naata Nungurrayi died in 2021.
Her career began relatively late, but during approximately 25 years of painting she developed a highly recognisable body of work grounded in Pintupi Country and women’s cultural knowledge.
Marrapinti remained central.
So did movement.
Rockholes.
Sandhills.
Women travelling.
Ceremony.
Her paintings carry these subjects through a visual language that could be quiet and balanced or dense and energetic.
What remained consistent was Country.
Nungurrayi did not paint the desert as an empty landscape.
She painted a network of places she had known, travelled through, and held within cultural memory.
Discover Naata Nungurrayi at Art Leven
Art Leven (formerly Cooee Art) has handled important works by Naata Nungurrayi, including paintings associated with Marrapinti, women’s ceremony, rockholes, and ancestral journeys across Pintupi Country.
Explore available and previously handled artworks, biographical information, exhibitions, collections, and market history on the Naata Nungurrayi artist profile. The profile currently includes works such as Marrapinti from 2009 and Women’s Ceremony at Marrapinti from 2002.