Nyapanyapa Yunupingu

Painted in 2009 and 2010, the artist describes this series of barks known as the 'white paintings’ as ‘meaningless’. A series of them were exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia in unDisclosed: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial in 2012. In the accompanying catalogue essay to the Triennial, curator Franchesca Cubillo writes,

“…during 2009, Nyapanyapa removed the figurative elements from her work so that only the layered coloured segments of crosshatching remained; this is called ‘mayilimiriw’. The literal translation of ‘mayilimiriw’ is ‘meaningless’; that is, they have no Dreaming narrative; however, they are not devoid of substance. These works no longer exist as landscapes in a horizontal plane, but rather are transferred onto a vertical plane. They can also be read as landscapes from a topographical perspective and not a lineal plane. This is an innovative departure from bark painting traditions as, in the past, vertical bark paintings tended to refer to body painting. Nyapanyapa’s ‘white paintings’ are mayilimiriw. They are unpretentious intuitive white waves of free-flowing crosshatching. One gets a sense of the melodic rhythm of the ocean’s competing currents. The works are like random movements of white foam on the shoreline as the ocean tides advance and recede.”

Cf. Will Stubbs, ‘Art of the Artless’, in Henry Skerritt (ed.) op cit; for discussion of the artist, her life and artistic practice.