Wintjiya Napaltjarri

Wintjiya's involvement in contemporary Indigenous Australian art began in 1994 at Haasts Bluff, when she participated in a group painting project and in the creation of batik fabrics.

[3] The ambiguity around the year of birth is in part because Indigenous Australians have a different conception of time, often estimating dates by comparisons with the occurrence of other events.

[4] Napaljarri (in Warlpiri) or Napaltjarri (in Western Desert dialects) 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.

[15] From the 1970s Napaltjarri created artefacts such as ininti seed necklaces, mats and baskets, using traditional artistic techniques including weaving of spinifex grass.

[17] When the women of Kintore, including sisters Wintjiya and Tjunkiya, started creating canvasses, their works bore little resemblance to those of their male peers (who had been painting for some years).

[3] Sources differ on when Wintjiya and her sister Tjunkiya had their cataracts removed: Johnson suggests 1999, but art centre coordinator Marina Strocchi, who worked closely with the women, states that it was 1994.

[20] These works were the product of a batik workshop run for the women of Haasts Bluff by Northern Territory Education Department staff Jill Squires and Therese Honan in the months following June 1994.

Circular markings, used by Wintjiya in both these batiks and her subsequent paintings, represent the eggs of the flying ant (waturnuma), one of the main subjects of her art.

[8] The sisters also gained experience with drypoint etching; works produced by Wintjiya in 2004 – Watiyawanu and Nyimpara – are held by the National Gallery of Australia.

Reviewing the exhibition, Christine Nicholls remarked of Wintjiya's Watanuma that it was a germinal painting, with fine use of muted colour, and showed sensitivity to the relationships between objects and spaces represented in the work.

[23] Likewise, Marina Strocchi has noted the contrast between some of the subtle colours used in batik and Wintjiya's characteristic painting palette, which is "almost exclusively stark white with black or red".