Maggie Watson Napangardi

Painted in Adelaide, South Australia in 1995

Kimberley Art, Melbourne, cat. no. KAMW 003/95, with additional later documentation bearing Kimberley Art cat. no. KA00281

Private Collection, Melbourne

Redot Gallery, Singapore

Private Collection, New York

Property of a collector, France

Maggie Napangardi Watson was a mainstay of the artists’ community at Yuendumu, west of Alice Springs, when the local art cooperative was established in 1985. Unlike the development of the painting movement at nearby Papunya in the early 1970s, which for the first years was restricted to male artists, women artists were at the forefront of the school of painting that flourished at Yuendumu in the mid-1980s. Napangardi Watson belonged to a family of prominent artists whose traditional lands lie to the west, focused on the salt lakes in and around the site of Mina Mina.

In the ancestral past, a large group of women travelled to Mina Mina where large wooden digging sticks emerged from the ground. Armed with these food-collecting tools, the women traversed an expansive area of desert creating sacred sites and freshwater springs by driving their sticks into the ground. The painting shows the women symbolically as U-shapes camped at various sites, their digging sticks to their sides, waterholes depicted as roundels on a ground patterned to make the visual association with the texture of hair string belts woven and worn by the female ancestors.

The most celebrated of her paintings are the large scale works she created at the end of her career, after she left the art centre at Yuendemu to live with her daughter and son-in-law in the southern city of Adelaide. Executed on a grand scale, meticulously painted using the most vibrant and diverse palette, these late paintings have been highly sought after by collectors since they first appeared at exhibition in Melbourne in the mid 1990s.

Wally Caruana