Daisy Jugadai Napaltjarri

Jugadai's works were selected for exhibition at the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards five times between 1993 and 2001, and she was a section winner in 2000.

[1] The ambiguity around the year of birth is in part because Indigenous people operate using a different conception of time from non-Indigenous Australians, often estimating dates through comparisons with the occurrence of other events.

[2] The people of Papunya and Haasts Bluff, such as Daisy, speak a variety of the Pintupi language referred to as Pintupi-Luritja,[1] a Western Desert dialect.

Napaltjarri (in Western Desert dialects) or Napaljarri (in Warlpiri) is a skin name, one of sixteen used to denote the subsections or subgroups in the kinship system of central Australian Indigenous people.

In the western desert communities such as Kintore, Yuendumu, Balgo, and on the outstations, people were beginning to create art works expressly for exhibition and sale.

[11] She learned to draw during her schooling at Papunya and Haasts Bluff,[12] but her first experience as a painter came working on backgrounds for the pictures created by her father.

[22] First exhibiting in the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in 1993,[16] she was a finalist on several occasions including 1995, 1998 and 2001,[1] and a section winner in 2000.

[5] Her 1994 entry in the award, Karu kapingku pungu (Creek after rain), belongs to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

[20] Curator Marina Strocchi notes how Daisy Jugadai's painting reflects close observation of the complex structures of the vegetation and environment, its features "obsessively detailed", with the artist "devotedly [including] all the bush tucker of that area", as well as choosing "a time of year in which to depict her country".

[5] Memory and Five Mile Creek was included in the National Gallery of Victoria's 2004–05 exhibition "Aboriginal Art Post 1984" and reviewer Miriam Cosic, while noting its "naive charm", also drew attention to the work's title and the implication that, like other more explicitly political painters of her era, "she too is talking of violent dispossession".

[25] Artist Mandy Martin, who participated in a 2005 collaboration with several painters from the Haasts Bluff region, thought that Daisy's rendering of bush tucker was achieved with a "stylised but dazzling personal language".