DORIS BUSH NUNGARRAYI : ULUMBARU: The place where I grew up

IN PARTNERSHP WTH PAPUNYA TJUPI ARTS
Now in her 80s, Doris Bush Nungarrayi is one of the most senior artists of her art centre Papunya Tjupi Arts, based in the community of Papunya, 240 km northwest of Alice Springs. She is one of a handful of Central Australian artists still painting who spent their early years living a largely traditional life on their lands.

This unique set of works was commissioned in 2021 by the Art Gallery of South Australia to feature in that gallery’s Tarnanthi exhibition of Aboriginal art. They have now been made available by Papunya Tjupi Arts to Everywhen to present as a selling exhibition.

 The subjects Nungarrayi chose to record were those of her early bush life in and around important creation sites such the Dingo Dreaming site of Nyumanu, to the southwest of Kintore, those around her birth place of Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff) and, as she described in an artist’s talk at Tarnanthi, those of Ulumbaru, 8km from Papunya. “I am the only one telling those stories now,” she said.

In these important paintings  Doris Bush Nungarrayi has recorded the events of creation stories (tjukurrpa) such as the snake and goanna as well as vivid memories of her happy early life in the bush – eating, hunting and swimming with her friends and family as well as love stories of her youth. In some works, she has depicted the traditional tools and weapons she and her friends used (and which she still makes) including kali (boomerang), wana (digging stick), puli (grinding stone), kutitji (shield), kulata (spear) and kantikanti (hitting stick). Many of the paintings relate events and places that are simultaneously of secular and sacred creation nature and about which she is unable to reveal much detail.