Ngaṉanpatju Yara | Our Story

“The route to Papunya from Alice Springs, via Glen Helen Gorge and the Western MacDonnell Ranges, takes you through colour-saturated country fractured with geological upheavals, sculpted by wind and water, scored and scoured by time. A crenellated horizontal strip of dark red dolomite, in places barely a metre thick, stalks along the foothills of the ranges like a horde of migrating stegosaurs. In the distance is the dark blue bulk of Mount Sonder: the Sleeping Woman lies prone and splayed, a vast fertility goddess with breasts and flanks cleft with indigo shadows. It’s a tableau of arrested movement, as if the creation beings have paused for the seconds it takes you to pass, and will resume the lively and inventive business of making the country as soon as you are gone. Papunya appears to be a random scatter of buildings punctuated with bougainvillea and eucalypts. In fact, the township’s layout, comprising a central circle with a concentric semicircle radiating from each quadrant, is based on representations of the Honey Ant Dreaming: the tjupi (honey ant) travelled through here and then headed east where it manifested as the Tjupi hills.”

- Kim Mahood

It is here in the birthplace of the Western Desert art movement that Papunya Tjupi Arts was established in 2007. The legacy of Papunya Tula, the organisation that has become synonymous with the emergence of Western Desert art, remains foundational in Papunya where not only is seemingly everyone directly connected to the first Papunya Tula painters, but even the streets are named after famous artists. This is undoubtedly painting country. The homelands movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the exodus of many of those early Papunya Tula painters back to their country, taking the company with them. Senior artists that remained in Papunya refused to resign themselves to not having their own art centre, and eventually, in 2007, Papunya Tjupi Arts was born. As an exemplar of an artist driven resurgence, Papunya Tjupi Arts is a 100% Aboriginal owned and directed community arts organisation, where the artists have established their own unique identity based on the legacy of their forefathers. There are traces of the formal Papunya style that evolved from the original painting movement – however the freedom for the now 150 artists to explore their own style has seen a complete nonconformity in the way painters find themselves in their canvas.

Ngaṉanpatju Yara - Our Story is a celebration of the breadth of unique visual identities Papunya Tjupi artists have created.

Exhibition Catalogue (PDF)