Eubena Nampitjin

(born circa 1924)

Kinyu, 2007

Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Warlayirti Artists, Wirrimanu (Balgo Hills), Western Australia (cat. no. 880-07)
Purchased from Raft Artspace, Darwin in September 2007
The Laverty Collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED:
Paintings from Remote Communities: Indigenous Australian Art from the Laverty Collection, Sydney, Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, 15 December 2007 - 24 February 2008; Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, 5 July - 31 August 2008

One of the major recurring themes in the latter part of her painting career is Kinyu, the ancestral Dingo. In the Dreaming Kinyu in the form of a man was attacked by intruders and defended himself by hurling sacred objects made of hair at them. These events occurred at a water soak called Midjul that Eubena would visit often to honour her ancestor. From about 2000, Eubena developed a series of architectural templates where lines of colours swirl and merge to meet along a central 'backbone' or prominent line as in Kinyu, 2007. The palette relies heavily on the reds and yellows she discovered in 1989 and that were to become a hallmark of much of her later work.

Wally Caruana

This painting is sold with accompanying Warlayirti Artists documentation.

EUBENA NAMPITJIN
The doyen of the women painters at Balgo, Eubena
Nampitjin lived through one of the major diasporas
in modern Australian history. Born at Yalantjiri, her
country runs along the Canning Stock Route that took
Aboriginal people to mission stations and settlements
far from their homelands and up into the Kimberley.
With her first husband Gimme, she drove cattle from
Kunawarritji (Well 33) to the railhead at Wiluna
in the south, and to Billiliuna Station in the north.
Eubena and Gimme and their family settled at Balgo
about 1948. When her first husband died around
1979, Eubena married Wimmitji Tjapangarti, a
maparn or traditional healer and a man of high ritual
authority. Together they recorded ancestral narratives
and ceremonies for the anthropologists Ronald and
Catherine Berndt, and later went on to collaborate in
paintings to become the most well known artist–couple
from Balgo. Eubena had originally begun to paint in
1986 for the exhibition Art from the Great Sandy Desert at
the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and she has been
represented in several major exhibitions in Australia
and abroad, including Images of Power: Aboriginal art
of the Kimberley at the National Gallery of Victoria
in 1993, ARATJARA, Art of the First Australians, at the
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, the
Hayward Gallery, London, and the Louisiana Museum,
Humlebaek, Denmark, in 1993–94, and Stories: Eleven
Aboriginal Artists, Works from The Holmes à Court Collection
at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany, in
1995. Eubena won the Open Painting section of the
Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Art Awards in Darwin in 1998. In 2010, Eubena was a
feature artist in the exhibition Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning
Stock Route, at the National Museum of Australia.

Wally Caruana