Mitjili Napurrula

Born:  c. 1945

Died:  2019

Language:  Pintupi 

Country:  Haasts Bluff, Northern Territory

Mitjili was born in Haasts Bluff and into a famous artistic family. Her mother was the artist, Tjunkiya Napaltjarri, who taught Mitjili the traditional symbolic language of the mythical stories by drawing them in the sand. Mitjili’s brother, the internationally respected artist,Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, was one of the founding artists of Papunya Tula Artists and the Western Desert art movement in the early 1970’s in Papunya. 

Mitjili married Long Tom Tjapanangka, a renowned artist, and they moved back to Haasts Bluff as part of the 1980’s outstation movement.

Mitjili began painting in 1993 in the Ikuntji Women’s Centre. Her distinctive style is anchored in the Tjukurrpa (dreaming) of her ancestors. Like her brother, Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, who was famous for spear straightening paintings, Mitjili inherited from her mother the right to paint the plants and places, notably the Watiya Tjuta, and her motifs represent the women’s side of the Tjukurrpa in her father’s country of Uwalki in the Gibson desert.

Collections include:

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne  
Melbourne Museum
Flinders University Art Museum, South Australia

Sources used:

Isaacs, Jennifer, Spirit Country, Hardie Grant Books, 1999
Ikuntji, Paintings from Haasts Bluff 1992 – 1994, IAD Press, 1995