Walangkura Napanangka

Born:  c. 1946

Died:  2014

Language:  Pintupi

Country:  Kintore, Northern Territory

Walangkura was born at the site of Tjitururrnga west of Kintore (which is desert country around the Northern Territory and Western Australian border). Walangkura’s father, Rartji, was a senior custodian of the country west of Karrkurutinjya (Lake MacDonald). They lived a nomadic life hunting and gathering from the desert. Her mother, Inyuwa Nampitjinpa, Rartji’s second wife married Tutuma Tjapangati after Rartji’s death in 1965.

As a teenager Walangkura and her family joined Uta Uta Tjangala’s group walking the hundreds of kilometres east to the mission settlement, Haasts Bluff (140kms west of Alice Springs), arriving December 1956. For years they moved between Haasts Bluff and Papunya joined by Walangkura’s beloved half sister, Pirrmangka.

When the outstation movement began in 1981 Walangkura and family moved back to Kintore. She began painting in 1994 for the Haasts Bluff / Kintore Women’s Painting Camp which was started by the senior women to acknowledge their own ancestral and spiritual heritage. Away from the men and others the women sang, participated in ceremony and painted and this vitality is reflected in the massive and colourful canvases

By 1996 Walangkura and many of the other women were working full-time with Papunya Tula Arts which was now also in Kintore. Their inclusion helped to invigorate it after the deaths of many of the early 1970’s Papunya Tula painting men.

Walangkura became one of Papunya Tula Artists most senior and sought-after artists and had her first solo exhibition in Melbourne in 2003.

Walangkura’s paintings depict the women’s Dreamings for the country around Kintore and Kiwirrkurra which she shared with Pirrmangka, her half-sister. These Dreamings include: Papunynga Wirrulnga, Umari, Malparingya spring and swamp, Ngartannga, Yunala rockhole west of Kiwirrkura and Tjintjintjin. Walangkura also paints the travels through Pintupi Country of her Tjukurrpa ancestor, Kutungka Napanangka, a powerful being able to devour humans.  

Walangkura’s work is full of movement with the colours flowing into each other as she represents rockholes, sandhills, the gatherings and ceremonies of ancestral women – all through the lens of her youth immersed in the power and vitality of the desert country. The artist, Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula, was Walangkura’s husband and they had six children.   

Collections include:  

National Gallery of Australia
Art Gallery of NSW
Queensland Art Gallery
National Gallery of Victoria
The Kelton Foundation, Santa Monica, USA

Sources used:

Johnson, Vivien, Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists, Australia. IAD Press, 2008